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Australia's biggest city announced tighter Covid restrictions including heavier fines and tighter policing on Saturday as authorities battled to contain a Delta outbreak and said they were seeing the "most concerning day of the pandemic" so far.
After months of pursuing a "Covid Zero" strategy, Australia has been struggling to bring a resurgence of coronavirus cases under control, with more than 10 million people under lockdown in its two largest cities and the capital Canberra.
Residents of Sydney, going into an eighth week under stay-at-home orders, will now face heftier fines for flouting rules or lying to contact tracers, with current restrictions proving insufficient to stop the spread.
Lockdown restrictions were also extended across the entire state of New South Wales for the first time this year, coming into force on Saturday afternoon for at least seven days.Police would boost patrols and checkpoints while hundreds more defence force personnel will help enforce stay-at-home orders as the outbreak in the most populous state of New South Wales hit another daily record of 466 community cases."Today is the most concerning day of the pandemic that we've seen," state premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.
Describing efforts to curb the outbreak as a war against the "diabolical" Delta strain, Berejiklian said Australia was facing a significant threat from the outbreak.
"For some time, we thought Australia was different to other parts of the world, but we're not."
Police commissioner Mick Fuller said he had sought additional powers after officers reported people using loopholes to evade restrictions.Residents are still allowed to leave their homes for exercise, shopping, health care and essential work โ but police would ramp up efforts to enforce restrictions, he said.Rules for leaving Sydney were also tightened to prevent the outbreak from spreading further into other regions.
The nation's capital, which is surrounded by New South Wales, was sent into lockdown earlier this week while the second-largest city of Melbourne is battling its own outbreak.
The resurgence has increased criticism of the country's sluggish vaccine roll-out, with just a quarter of eligible Australians so far fully vaccinated.
Comment: Meanwhile, in Iran (
from the Guardian):
Iran says it will impose a six-day-long "general lockdown" in cities across the country after being hit by what it describes as its fifth wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, state media has reported.
The lockdown includes all bazaars, markets and public offices, as well as movie theatres, gyms and restaurants in all Iranian cities. It will begin on Monday and will last through to Saturday.
The national coronavirus taskforce, which issued the decision, also ordered a travel ban between all Iranian cities from Sunday to Friday.
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So far, authorities have avoided imposing heavy handed rules on a population badly equipped to bear them. Iran, which has had the worst virus outbreak in the region, is reeling from a series of crises: tough US sanctions, global isolation, a heat wave, the worst blackouts in recent memory and ongoing protests over water and electricity shortages.
Iran'ssupreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, in January slammed shut any possibility of vaccines made in the US or UK entering the country, calling them "forbidden".
For now, the majority of Iranians receiving vaccines rely on foreign-made shots. A health ministry spokesperson said Iran could import western vaccines "as long as they're not produced in the US or Britain".
Comment: Meanwhile, in Iran (from the Guardian):