The coronavirus infection rate in Australia’s hard-hit Victoria state has been “relatively flat” in the past week, a state health official said
August 7, 2020, 3:45 AM
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Share to FacebookShare to TwitterEmail this articleMELBOURNE, Australia -- The coronavirus infection rate in Australia’s hard-hit Victoria state has been “relatively flat” in the past week, a state health official said.
Victoria registered 450 new cases and 11 deaths on Friday.
Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews said almost a third of the latest cases — 139 —were health care workers.
“Our nurses, doctors, ambulance, paramedics, cooks, cleaners, orderlies, ward clerks, everybody in our hospital system, they are not the front-line, they are the last line of defense. And I would just ask all Victorians to follow the rules to protect themselves but also to protect our dedicated healthcare team. They are heroes,” Andrews said.
Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton described the latest tally as “reasonable,” noting that numbers would fluctuate due to laboratory processes.
“The trend overall is that we’re kind of sitting at 400 to 500 cases a day. That is relatively flat over the last week,” Sutton said.
Melbourne University epidemiologist Tony Blakely said mandatory mask-wearing had started curbing the coronavirus spread.
The infection rate began to plateau at the end of July, a week after Melbourne residents risked fines if they left home without a mask, Blakely said.
Tougher lockdown restrictions came into force in Melbourne on Thursday for the next six weeks.
In other developments in the Asia-Pacific region:
— Beijing reported its first new case of COVID-19 from local transmission in a week. State media said Friday the case was linked to a recent outbreak in the northern port city of Dalian and the patient had been under monitoring for several days before testing positive. China’s capital has registered only a few scattered new cases since bringing to heel a June outbreak linked to a wholesale food market that caused 335 infections and anti-virus restrictions have been relaxed. Overall, newly reported cases of COVID-19 in China remained level, with 37 reported on Friday by the National Health Commission. An ongoing outbreak in the northwestern region of Xinjiang accounted for 26 of them, while 10 cases were brought by Chinese travelers from outside the country. Hong Kong continues to deal with its latest outbreak, with 95 new cases and three additional fatalities reported.
