Victorian Prime Minister Daniel Andrews says restrictions will only ease when 70% of eligible residents receive the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine.
This is expected to happen around September 23rd. To date, 56% of people aged 16 and over have received the first dose.
“What we need to do is suppress the number of cases enough to save us time to vaccinate people. What that means is that today we can’t alleviate the restrictions in a profound way,” Andrews said.
Victoria recorded 120 new cases on Wednesday, up from 76 on Tuesday, but substantially less than the 1,116 cases recorded in neighboring New South Wales, which also reported four new deaths.
Leaders in both states admit they will not be able to eradicate the virus and are competing to vaccinate their populations before removing most blocking restrictions, according to the national plan.
Sydney is now entering its third month of blockade after imposing restrictions on the move on 26 June.
NSW officials said the road to freedom is higher vaccination coverage. To date, 37% of people over the age of 16 are fully vaccinated, with the promise of reducing some edges once this rate reaches 70% or 80%.
In an attempt to increase supply, one of the main limitations of the vaccine launch, Australia on Tuesday signed a vaccine exchange agreement with Singapore for 500,000 doses of Pfizer, which will arrive soon. The government has also bought about a million emergency shots in Poland.
Neighboring New Zealand has registered 75 new Covid-19s confirmed in the last 24 hours, all but one in the city of Auckland. Auckland and surrounding areas have been closed since 17 August, which is known as alert level 4 in New Zealand.
But at a news conference on Wednesday, New Zealand’s director general of health, Ashley Bloomfield, said the higher figures “were not unexpected”, and said the rate of virus reproduction in the community was still high. “promising.”
“Of the cases we reported yesterday, only 25% were considered to be infectious in the community long before they were diagnosed,” he said, adding that he expected the number of cases to continue to decline.
“We are successfully breaking the transmission chains.”