Sharjah24 – Reuters: Australian officials on Sunday said there was no need to clamp down on Christmas festivities even as new COVID-19 infections climbed in Sydney, with the country's high vaccination rate helping keep people out of hospital.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said he was confident Australia would not need to follow the Netherlands, which has reimposed a strict lockdown over the Christmas and New Year period to curb the spread of the highly contagious Omicron variant.
"We're going into summer, we have one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and a very different set of circumstances. So we don't see that's a likely situation in Australia," Hunt told reporters in a televised media conference.
The Netherlands, he said, has suffered vastly higher infections and deaths than Australia over the pandemic and is now in the depths of winter when cases were more likely to climb sharply.
Australia's most populous state, New South Wales, on Sunday reported a record 2,566 new cases, up from 2,482 on Saturday. Cases in intensive care remained low at 28, which state premier Dominic Perrottet said was "incredibly positive".
The state has reported more than 11,000 new cases in the past week, quadruple the number in the previous week, sparking calls from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and an online campaign urging the state to reinstate track and trace codes, mandatory masks and capacity limits.
Total new cases reported in Australia on Sunday fell to 3,958 from a record 4,110 reported the previous day, thanks to a drop in Victoria state to 1,240 new infections on Sunday.
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