Australia
Australia official urges against AstraZeneca
The top health official in Australia’s Queensland state is advising adults under age 40 not to take the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine because of the risk of a rare blood clotting disorder, even though the Australian government is making those shots available to all adults.
Read:Australia battles several clusters in new pandemic phase
Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young said Wednesday that younger adults should wait for the scarce Pfizer vaccine to become available. Young says that with only 42 coronavirus cases active in Queensland, AstraZeneca is not worth the risk for younger adults.
The federal government decided Monday to make AstraZeneca available to all adults as concerns grow about clusters of the delta variant of the coronavirus, which is thought to be more contagious.
Read:Australian court upholds ban on most international travel
Australian authorities still say Pfizer is the preferred option for people younger than 60.
Australia battles several clusters in new pandemic phase
Australia was battling to contain several COVID-19 clusters around the country on Monday in what some experts have described as the nation’s most dangerous stage of the pandemic since the earliest days.
Sydney in the east and Darwin in the north were locked down on Monday. Perth in the west made masks compulsory for three days and warned a lockdown could follow after a resident tested positive after visiting Sydney more than a week ago.
Brisbane and Canberra have or will soon make wearing masks compulsory. South Australia state announced new statewide restrictions from Tuesday.
Australia has been relatively successful in containing clusters throughout the pandemic, registering fewer than 31,000 cases since the pandemic began. But the new clusters have highlighted the nation’s slow vaccine rollout with only 5% of the population fully vaccinated.
Read:Australian court upholds ban on most international travel
Most of the new cases stem from a Sydney limousine driver who tested positive on June 16 to the delta variant, which is thought to be more contagious. He was not vaccinated, reportedly did not wear a mask and is suspected to have been infected while transporting a foreign air crew from Sydney Airport.
New South Wales state on Monday reported 18 new cases in the latest 24-hour period. The tally was fewer than 30 cases recorded on Sunday and 29 on Saturday.
Authorities warned that a two-week Sydney lockdown that began on Friday would not reduce infection rates for another five days.
“We have to be prepared for the numbers to bounce around and we also have to be prepared for the numbers to go up considerably,” New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
Health policy adviser Bill Bowtell, who was the architect of Australia’s first AIDS response in the 1980s, said the government needed to consider hastening vaccinations by shortening the gap between AstraZeneca shots from 12 to 8 weeks.
“We really face the most serious crisis in the COVID pandemic since the early days in February-March last year,” Bowtell said.
The crisis has also highlighted the dangers posed by hotel quarantine, which is the source of most cases of community virus spread in Australia.
Read:Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
A mine worker is suspected to have become infected with the delta variant while in hotel quarantine in Brisbane in Queensland state before flying to a gold mine in the Northern Territory.
The miner infected at least six people at the mine. One of the infected miners had since traveled home to Queensland and another to New South Wales.
Authorities were attempting to track down 900 mine workers around the country who could have been infected by the initial case.
The Northern Territory capital Darwin, and neighboring Palmerston, on Sunday locked down for 48 hours after an infected miner returned home to Palmerston.
That lockdown would be extended to Friday after another miner tested positive after returning home to Darwin on Friday, officials said on Monday. The Northern Territory has never before experienced COVID-19 spreading in the community.
Queensland on Monday reported three new cases, including the miner. She is one of 170 potentially infected miners who live in the state and fly to an from work.
Read:Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
Masks will become compulsory from Tuesday for two weeks in Brisbane and several surrounding towns.
“The next 24-to-48 hours are going to be very crucial in Queensland about whether or not we see any spread of this delta strain,” Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczu said.
The Queensland government has called on the federal government to tighten already tough border restrictions to reduce the number of travelers arriving in Australia.
Western Australia state reported one new case in Perth linked to the Sydney cluster. The state is home to 177 of the potentially infected miners.
Australian court upholds ban on most international travel
An Australian court on Tuesday rejected a challenge to the federal government’s draconian power to prevent most citizens from leaving the country so that they don’t bring COVID-19 home.
Australia is alone among developed democracies in preventing its citizens and permanent residents from leaving the country except in “exceptional circumstances” where they can demonstrate a “compelling reason.”
Most Australians have been stranded in their island nation since March 2020 under a government emergency order made under the powerful Biosecurity Act.
Read:Hundreds evacuated, some by chopper, from New Zealand floods
Libertarian group LibertyWorks argued before the full bench of the Federal Court in early May that Health Minister Greg Hunt did not have the power to legally enforce the travel ban that has prevented thousands of Australians from attending weddings and funerals, caring for dying relatives and meeting newborn babies.
LibertyWorks lawyer Jason Potts argued that Australians had a right to leave their country under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that Australia had ratified.
But the three judges ruled that submission was based on the “erroneous premise that the right is absolute.”
LibertyWorks’ lawyers also argued that such a biosecurity control order could only be imposed on an individual rather than an entire population. The order could only be imposed if that individual had symptoms of a listed human disease, had been exposed to such a disease or had failed to comply with travel requirements.
The judges ruled that that interpretation of the law would frustrate Parliament’s clear intentions when lawmakers created the emergency powers in the Biosecurity Act in 2015.
“It may be accepted that the travel restrictions are harsh. It may also be accepted that they intrude upon individual rights,” the judges said in their ruling. “But Parliament was aware of that.”
LibertyWorks President Andrew Cooper did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the ruling.
He had expected hundreds of thousands of Australians to fly within weeks if he had won.
Read:Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians
Critics of the emergency order argue it is harshest for the 30% of Australians who were born overseas.
The government says tough border controls have played an important part in Australia’s relative success in containing COVID-19 spread.
Surveys suggest most Australians applaud their government’s drastic border controls.
The Australian newspaper published a survey last month that found 73% of respondents said the international border should remain closed until at least the middle of next year.
Australian Broadcasting Corp. last week reported its own survey had found 79% of respondents agree the international border should stay shut until the pandemic is under control globally.
Critics of the Australian travel restrictions argue that decisions on who can travel and why are inconsistent and lack transparency.
Esther and Charles Baker, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish couple from Melbourne, were twice refused exemptions to fly to New Jersey to attend their youngest son’s wedding in June last year.
They appealed to the Federal Court, citing religious and cultural reasons among their exceptional circumstances. But a judge dismissed their case and ordered the couple to pay the government’s legal costs for their challenge.
Read:Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
A person at the center of a coronavirus cluster in Australia’s second-largest city, Melbourne, had been allowed to attend a wedding in India. He was not infected in that country but rather during the required 14-day hotel quarantine upon his return. Authorities say he was infected by a traveler in another room on his floor and that the virus was carried in the air.
Melbourne began a seven-day lockdown on Friday due to the cluster that by Tuesday had grown to more than 50 cases.
Australia and New Zealand opened a quarantine-free travel bubble in April and hope to create such bubbles with other countries in time.
Hundreds evacuated, some by chopper, from New Zealand floods
Several hundred people in New Zealand were evacuated from their homes Monday with some recounting dramatic helicopter rescues as heavy rain caused widespread flooding in the Canterbury region.
Authorities declared a state of emergency after some places received as much as 40 centimeters (16 inches) of rain over the weekend and into Monday. Forecasters warned of possible heavy rain through Monday evening before conditions improved.
The military helped evacuate more than 50 people including several overnight in an NH-90 military helicopter.
Read:Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
One man was clinging to a tree near the town of Darfield when he jumped into floodwaters and tried to swim to safety but was swept away, the military said.
Helicopter crews scoured the water for 30 minutes before finding the man and plucking him to safety. The military helicopter also rescued an elderly couple from the roof of their car.
“Seeing the community overnight pull together and support the displaced residents who were evacuated from their homes has been heartening,” said Army Liaison Officer Cpt. Jake Faber.
Read:111-year-old Australian recommends eating chicken brains
Another man was rescued by a civilian helicopter pilot Sunday after he was swept from his farm as he tried to move his stock to safety.
Paul Adams told news organization Stuff he thinks he got hit by a wall of water he didn’t see coming. He was swept down the raging Ashburton River before managing to drag himself onto a fence and then into a tree. Another farmer spotted his headlamp and organized a rescue mission.
“The rescuers are fantastic,” Adams told Stuff, adding that he was now back on his farm and “good as gold.” He said that so far he’d only found about 100 of his herd of 250 animals alive.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was visiting New Zealand, told reporters that he was thinking of those caught up in the floods.
Read:Facebook says it will lift its Australian news ban soon
“Australia is no stranger to floods,” Morrison said. “Or fires, or cyclones, or, indeed, even mouse plagues. We have, both countries, endured a large amount of challenge over the course, particularly, of these last few years.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern planned to travel to Christchurch later Monday to be briefed on the situation firsthand.
Plague of ravenous, destructive mice tormenting Australians
At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.
Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.
“We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.
Bruce Barnes said he is taking a gamble by planting crops on his family farm near the central New South Wales town of Bogan Gate.
Read:Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
“We just sow and hope,” he said.
The risk is that the mice will maintain their numbers through the Southern Hemisphere winter and devour the wheat, barley and canola before it can be harvested.
NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.
The state government has ordered 5,000 liters (1,320 gallons) of the banned poison Bromadiolone from India. The federal government regulator has yet to approve emergency applications to use the poison on the perimeters of crops. Critics fear the poison will kill not only mice but also animals that feed on them. including wedge-tail eagles and family pets.
“We’re having to go down this path because we need something that is super strength, the equivalent of napalm to just blast these mice into oblivion,” Marshall said.
The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia’s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse, or Mus musculus.
The same government-commissioned advisers who have helped farmers cope with the drought, fire and floods are returning to help people deal with the stresses of mice.
The worst comes after dark, when millions of mice that had been hiding and dormant during the day become active.
By day, the crisis is less apparent. Patches of road are dotted with squashed mice from the previous night, but birds soon take the carcasses away. Haystacks are disintegrating due to ravenous rodents that have burrowed deep inside. Upending a sheet of scrap metal lying in a paddock will send a dozen mice scurrying. The sidewalks are strewn with dead mice that have eaten poisonous bait.
Read:111-year-old Australian recommends eating chicken brains
But a constant, both day and night, is the stench of mice urine and decaying flesh. The smell is people’s greatest gripe.
“You deal with it all day. You’re out baiting, trying your best to manage the situation, then come home and just the stench of dead mice,” said Jason Conn, a fifth generation farmer near Wellington in central New South Wales.
“They’re in the roof cavity of your house. If your house is not well sealed, they’re in bed with you. People are getting bitten in bed,” Conn said. “It doesn’t relent, that’s for sure.”
Colin Tink estimated he drowned 7,500 mice in a single night last week in a trap he set with a cattle feeding bowl full of water at his farm outside Dubbo.
“I thought I might get a couple of hundred. I didn’t think I’d get 7,500,” Tink said.
Barnes said mouse carcasses and excrement in roofs were polluting farmers’ water tanks.
“People are getting sick from the water,” he said.
The mice are already in Barnes’ hay bales. He’s battling them with zinc phosphide baits, the only legal chemical control for mice used in broad-scale agriculture in Australia. He’s hoping that winter frosts will help contain the numbers.
Farmers like Barnes endured four lean years of drought before 2020 brought a good season as well as the worst flooding that some parts of New South Wales have seen in at least 50 years. But the pandemic brought a labor drought. Fruit was left to rot on trees because foreign backpackers who provide the seasonal workforce were absent.
Plagues seemingly appear from nowhere and often vanish just as fast.
Read:Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
Disease and a shortage of food are thought to trigger a dramatic population crash as mice feed on themselves, devouring the sick, weak and their own offspring.
Government researcher Steve Henry, whose agency is developing strategies to reduce the impact of mice on agriculture, said it is too early to predict what damage will occur by spring.
He travels across the state holding community meetings, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the mice problem.
“People are fatigued from dealing with the mice,” Henry said.
Australia’s Victoria state to return to lockdown
The city that was once Australia’s worst COVID-19 hot spot on Thursday announced a seven-day lockdown, its fourth since the pandemic began.
The lockdown for Melbourne and the rest of Victoria state comes after a new cluster in the city rose to 26 infections, including a person who was in intensive care.
Victoria Acting Premier James Merlino said: “Unless something changes, this will be increasingly uncontrollable.”
The new Melbourne cluster was found after a traveler from India became infected with a more contagious variant of the virus while in hotel quarantine in South Australia state earlier this month. The traveler was not diagnosed until he returned home to Melbourne.
Read:Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
Australia’s second largest city last year underwent a second wave of infections that peaked at 725 new cases in a single August day at a time when community spread had been virtually eliminated elsewhere in the country.
That lockdown lasted for 111 days. A third lockdown that lasted for five days in February was triggered by a cluster of 13 cases linked to hotel quarantine near Melbourne Airport.
Victoria accounts for 820 of Australia’s 910 coronavirus deaths during the pandemic.
111-year-old Australian recommends eating chicken brains
Australia’s oldest-ever man has included eating chicken brains among his secrets to living more than 111 years.
Retired cattle rancher Dexter Kruger on Monday marked 124 days since he turned 111, a day older than World War I veteran Jack Lockett was when he died in 2002.
Kruger told Australian Broadcasting Corp. in an interview at his nursing home in the rural Queensland state town of Roma days before the milestone that a weekly poultry delicacy had contributed to his longevity.
“Chicken brains. You know, chickens have a head. And in there, there’s a brain. And they are delicious little things,” Kruger said. “There’s only one little bite.”
Read:Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
Kruger’s 74-year-old son Greg credits his father’s simple Outback lifestyle for his long life.
Nursing home manger Melanie Calvert said Kruger, who is writing his autobiography, was “probably one of the sharpest residents here.”
“His memory is amazing for a 111-year-old,” Calvert said.
John Taylor, a founder of The Australian Book of Records, confirmed that Kruger had become the oldest-ever Australian man.
The oldest-ever verified Australian was Christina Cook, who died in 2002 aged 114 years and 148 days.
Australia won’t buy J&J coronavirus vaccine
The Australian government has decided against buying the single-dose Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine as a way to accelerate its immunization program.
Health Minister Greg Hunt said Tuesday the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is similar to the AstraZeneca product, which Australia already contracted to buy.
Also read: Merck to help produce rival J&J’s COVID-19 vaccine
Australia had planned to rely on Australian-manufactured AstraZeneca with the goal of delivering at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults among a population of 26 million by October. But the government announced last week that the Pfizer vaccine is now the preferred option for people under 50 because of a potential health risk from AstraZeneca.
Australia has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses. Australia had acquired 3.7 doses of the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines by Monday and had injected 1.2 million doses.
Facebook says it will lift its Australian news ban soon
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