These are some newscasts I produced for NPR in 2020/21 covering Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Australia, the people of Victoria, the epicenter of the country’s second coronavirus wave are getting some relief today. Restrictions are beginning to ease after around 100 days of strict lockdown.
The 5 million residents of Melbourne, the state’s capital, have endured one of the world’s longest pandemic-related lockdowns and the strictest in the country. Residents are no longer restricted in the number of hours they spend outside their home, the distance they can travel will increase to 15 miles and stores and restaurants are expected to re-open for full operation by November 1st.
In a state that almost stamped out the virus in early June, only to endure a spike a month later, the Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, says he is not doing what is popular but what is safe.
“There is a lot at stake. If we do too much too fast, then we’ill be where none of us ever want to be again.”
On Sunday, Victoria recorded just two new cases of Covid-19
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews announced Melbourne would now go into stage four restrictions for six weeks. These include a nightly curfew, limits on shopping, exercise and education.
The state had largely beat the virus in early June, recording only a handful or no news cases a day. But in early July, the number of community acquired cases sored into the hundreds, just weeks after initial restrictions were lifted.
Premier Andrews raised concern not just about the growing number of community transmissions but also the number of cases that can’t be traced.
“Those mysteries, that community transmission is our biggest challenge and the reason why we need to move to a different set of rules.”
There is currently a judicial inquiry into breeches of infection control with the hotel quarantine of returned travelers, which is thought to have contributed to the state’s second wave.
Known as COVID-safe, the app uses bluetooth technology to determine if you have been in close contact with a person who tests positive for COVID-19 in the past 21 days. If an app user tests positive for COVID-19, the government will ask permission to access the encrypted data on their phone. The government’s Chief Medical Officer says this is a key tactic in stemming the virus, and doesn’t overstep any privacy concerns. “It is only for one purpose, to help contact tracing if someone becomes positive.” The government promised to introduce legislation in May to criminalise any use of the data outside the purpose of contact tracing and all data will be deleted once the pandemic has passed.
The second group of Australian COVID-19 evacuees from Wuhan, China reportedly finished up their quarantine on Wednesday, but there’s still one family that remains in the immigration detention center on Christmas Island where they stayed. The controversial decision to use the detention center as a quarantine site, brought renewed attention to a Tamil couple from Sri Lanka and their two Australian born children aged 4 and 2, who, before the evacuees arrived, were the only ones there.
The Australian government chartered its first evacuation flight today out of the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the new coronavirus. This evacuation took place amid a controversial plan to quarantine evacuees in an offshore Australian immigration detention center on a remote island in the Indian Ocean.
Almost 300 Australians were flown out of Wuhan that took evacuees to Christmas Island via Western Australia. Only the passengers on board, not the crew, will be held in the detention center for at least 14 days.
The immigration detention center operated from 2003 until late 2018, and has been the site of numerous cases of abuse and unrest. It has been a pillar of Australia’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies, which aim to deter refugees arriving by boat from seeking asylum in the country.
Parents in China felt conflicted by this evacuation offer, with some preferring to stay in Wuhan rather than send their children to the offshore immigration detention center.
The detention center which costs millions to operate and can hold thousands of people, reopened mid-last year, to detain a Tamil couple from Sri Lanka and their two young children, both of whom were born in Australia as they fight an ongoing deportation case.