Will you take a little more confinement? The confinement in force since the end of June in Sydney (south-eastern Australia) will be extended by at least a week to counter the renewed epidemic, the authorities announced on Wednesday, reporting 27 new cases of contamination. The five million inhabitants of Australia’s most populous city have been living since June 26 with a ban on leaving their homes in an attempt to contain the progression of the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19. This new confinement was supposed to last two weeks, so it will at least be in effect until July 16.
“This Delta variant is a game-changer, it is extremely transmissible,” lamented Gladys Berejiklian, Prime Minister of New South Wales, a state with Sydney as its capital. “We do not want to find ourselves in the position where we would have to constantly move from confinements to deconfinements,” she added, explaining that extending the confinement was “the best way to ensure that it is our only confinement before the entire population is vaccinated ”.
“Zero Covid” strategy under debate
Residents can currently only go out to buy essentials, get medical care, exercise, go to school or work if they cannot work from home. Australia’s strategy, which consists of targeting zero cases, means that the country’s international borders have been closed for fifteen months, and that localized lockdowns have been ordered on an ad hoc basis in certain cities. This approach means that Australians have generally continued to live normal lives since the start of the pandemic as the country avoided the spiraling number of contaminations.
Since the start of the pandemic, Australia has recorded just over 30,000 cases, including 910 deaths. But more and more questions are being asked about the sustainability of such a model and the country’s capacity to live cut off from the world. The Sydney outbreak at this stage only totals 357 cases, which illustrates the rigor of the strategy in place. By way of comparison, the United Kingdom plans to lift its latest restrictions as it registers 27,000 new infections per day. But the Australian outlook is weighed down by the slowness of the vaccination campaign since less than 8% of the population has been immunized against Covid-19.