Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Tuesday that Australia's government will not impose mask mandates or lockdowns, as he called on Australians to take "personal responsibility" amid a nationwide surge in new Covid-19 cases just ahead of the holiday season.
Despite a surge in new Covid-19 cases, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia will not go back.
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Morrison said at the press conference that Australia has to move past heavy-handed government action as he urged state and local authorities to shift away from a culture of mandates.
The omicron variant is driving record numbers of daily infections in Australia.
Morrison acknowledged the need to calibrate how we manage this virus because of omicron, but insisted that we are not going back to the days of lock downs.
Morrison said that people who are fully vaccined will be better protected than those who are not.
The Australian Prime Minister criticized state governments for slowing down the nationwide vaccine roll and urged them to reopen vaccine hubs to speed up the roll out of booster doses.
We're not going to go back to being on lock downs. Morrison said that Australia will have to learn to live with the virus and that they will live with it with common sense and responsibility.
The number is big.
89.5%. The total percentage of eligible Australians who have been fully vaccined against Covid-19 is according to a tracker run by the Sydney Morning Herald. Australia began to remove most of its measures after the national vaccine rate reached 80%.
Australia is facing its worst-ever surge in Covid-19 cases, fueled by the highly infectious omicron variant. The country reported 4,600 new cases on Tuesday, beating the previous high of 4,100 set over the weekend. State leaders want Morrison to speed up the booster program and allow people to get their additional dose four months after their second shot. The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation is considering reclassifying the definition of fully vaccineed to include people who have received three doses instead of two.
The key background.
Australia relied on some of the world's strictest border control measures to curb the spread of the coronaviruses. After being faced with a persistent delta variant-fueled outbreak earlier this year, the Morisson government signaled its intent to pivot away from a Covid elimination strategy. Morrison indicated that Australia will live with the virus once a large proportion of its population is fully vaccineed. The country has relaxed nearly all Covid restrictions over the past two months. The emergence of the omicron variant is likely to pose the biggest threat to Australia's strategy as it has been shown to blunt the effectiveness of both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines that have been widely administered in the country.
Scott Morrison wants personal responsibility instead of mask mandates.
The time for heavy hand is behind us, says the PM.
Coverage and live updates on the coronaviruses.
