MIL-OSI Australia: Official Leave | Global ForeignAffairs co nz foreignaffairs.co.nz - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from foreignaffairs.co.nz Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Scott Morrison is going on annual leave for a week following the arrival of new and more contagious Covid strains in Australia from the UK and South Africa.
The Prime Minister is handing over to Deputy PM and Nationals leader Michael McCormack until January 18, as health authorities plan the February roll-out of coronavirus vaccines.
After a tough year battling a pandemic Mr Morrison is entitled to take a break, as state premiers had been last week, but some of the PM s harsher critics have regularly brought up his Hawaii holiday in December 2019 during the summer bushfires.
Scott Morrison is going on annual leave for a week following the arrival of new and more contagious Covid strains in Australia from the UK and South Africa. The Prime Minister is pictured with his wife Jenny and their daughters Abbey and Lily
Covid restrictions and overseas travel bans are likely to continue even as a vaccine is rolled out, Australia s Chief Medical Officer has conceded.
Face masks have been compulsory on public transport and at shopping malls in greater Sydney since January 4 following a spate of cases on the Northern Beaches and in the city s west.
Brisbane went even further during this weekend s three-day lockdown, mandating face masks in private cars, even in vehicles that aren t an Uber ride share or a taxi as Queensland tackles the arrival of a new UK strain.
Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly has conceded Covid restrictions are likely to continue through most of 2021, even though an AstraZeneca vaccine is due to be administered from mid-February followed by Pfizer jabs.
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Aseries of unremarkable activities – a train ride from the suburbs to the city, two visits to the supermarket, a brief stop at the newsagency – triggered a national health emergency with a casual cleaner at its centre.
How the cleaner, a woman in her 20s who works at a Brisbane CBD quarantine hotel and lives in the southern suburb of Algester, caught the highly contagious UK variant of COVID-19 remains under investigation.
But confirmation she had that strain put all Australian governments on high alert last week and triggered a snap three-day lockdown for more than 2.3 million south-eastern Queenslanders, which ended at 6pm Monday.
The HOTEL Grand Chancellor cluster of the highly contagious UK COVID-19 variant has triggered one of Queensland s biggest days of testing during the year-long coronavirus pandemic. In the 24 hours to Sunday morning, 19,152 samples were analysed for the pandemic virus, numbers only topped over three consecutive days in late August during the detention centre outbreak. Queensland s latest COVID cluster, responsible for a short, sharp, shock three-day lockdown in Greater Brisbane, stands at three cases at the Grand Chancellor, an inner-city quarantine hotel. The Hotel Grand Chancellor in inner-city Brisbane, where a worker has tested positive to the highly contagious UK COVID-19 variant. Photo: Dan Peled