Victoria Health has updated its list of exposure sites, bringing the total number of places to 534. Morrison said this was not supported by the advice given to national cabinet by the Doherty Institute’s professor Jodie McVernon, and that once 70% of the country was vaccinated, lockdowns would be “unlikely and targeted”, regardless of how many active cases there were in the community. This is despite one of the architects of the Doherty modelling, Prof James McCaw, telling Guardian Australia that case numbers were too high to abandon lockdowns even if the vaccination rate reached 70%. Hundreds of active Covid cases in the community should not delay Australia’s plan to reopen and end widespread lockdowns, Scott Morrison says, urging people to look beyond a “one-eyed focus” on daily case numbers.Īs NSW recorded 830 new cases and three deaths on Sunday, Morrison also pushed back against suggestions that case numbers were too high for Australia to move to the next phase of the plan agreed to by state leaders, saying the conclusions of the Doherty Institute modelling remained the same. And finally Australia’s chief medical officer Prof Paul Kelly said he d oesn’t think it is possible to completely eliminate Covid-19 from Australia, suggesting that WA Premier Mark McGowan’s assertion that WA has eliminated Covid-19 is unsustainable.

Across the Tasman New Zealand recorded 21 new Covid-19 cases for the second day in a row, with a potential super-spreading event stemming from a Samoan Assembly of God church service.Hundreds of people are gathered in an anti-lockdown protest on the Queensland-New South Wales border, including a man riding around on a white horse, encouraging the crowd to cross over the border.This brings the total cluster in the territory up to 121. The ACT also recorded 19, six of whom were infectious in the community.Victoria recorded 65 new cases, the regional cluster in Shepparton growing and a new outbreak at the Royal Melbourne hotel causing concern.New South Wales recorded 830 cases today, the highest ever daily total, with Brad Hazzard reassuring the public that the state’s health system was up to the task.Okay! So that’s been the day in Australian Covid-19 news.

Australian lockdown protest