Sydney Sends In Military To Help Enforce Lockdown Amid Record Jump In COVID Cases
Despite being locked down for nearly a month now, Sydney has just reported a record one-day rise in local COVID cases on Thursday as public health authorities warned that the outbreak would likely worsen, inspiring them to once again turn to the Australian military for help.
According to Reuters, Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, has struggled to contain an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant with another economy-crippling lockdown. Instead, cases have continued to move higher, leading public health authorities to double down on their efforts to protect against a broader outbreak of the delta variant, believed to be far more infectious than other strains.
But that didn’t stop authorities from counting 239 locally transmitted cases in the past 24 hours, the biggest daily increase for Sydney since the pandemic began. We should note that Australia’s COVID issue has never really been all that bad: nationwide, the country of 26MM has counted fewer than 1,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, a far lower rate.
“We can only assume that things are likely to get worse before they get better given the quantity of people infectious in the community,” said New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.
Berejiklian said one more person had died from COVID-19, taking the death toll from the current outbreak to 13, while the national death toll rose to 921.
Unfortunately for Berejiklian, who has emerged as a kind of villain for the small business owners and restaurateurs who fear they’re about to be crushed by a “double dip” recession, the Australian military is probably better at twerking than fighting viruses.
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