Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has defended the country’s hotel quarantine system after a COVID-19 outbreak in Melbourne.
Morrison told Parliament on Wednesday that hotel quarantine for international arrivals to Australia has been 99.99 per cent effective in preventing the pandemic.
The number of cases linked to a new outbreak in Melbourne’s north grew to 15 on Wednesday.
The opposition Labour Party had criticised the government’s failure to establish a national purpose-built quarantine facility.
“The Commonwealth and the states had worked together to put in place a system of quarantine, administering state public health orders, that has had a 99.99 per cent effectiveness rate,’’ Morrison told Parliament in response.
As COVID-19 re-emerged in the community in Melbourne, there had been about 3.8 million COVID-19 vaccine doses administered in Australia.
“At our current pace of roughly 516,000 doses a week, we can expect to reach the 40 million doses needed to fully vaccinate Australia’s adult population in late Sept. 2022,’’ said the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s report.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there had been 30,048 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia, and the numbers of local and overseas acquired cases in the last 24 hours were nine and four respectively, with one under investigation, according to the latest figures from the Department of Health.
(Xinhua/NAN)
