Live Australian News Update: Victoria Records 80 New Cases As Coalition Says Targeted Blockages May Continue – Live | Australia News



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Have a good last session of the week.

This is not too important, the emphasis being rightly placed on everything that happens outside parliament.

Gladys Berejiklian doing all she can to get people to start looking at vaccination and hospitalization rates rather than daily case counts (which she calls an emotional roller coaster) after another record breaking day in NSW yesterday.

But with the healthcare system under increasing pressure (Blacktown Hospital joined Westmead in emergency measures last night as it struggled to cope with Covid patients), questions arise as to what the system health can take more.

Still, some NSW statewide lockdown areas could be released from the most severe restrictions by the end of the week and Berejiklian remains set on “extra freedom” for people who are doubly vaccinated in the country. areas that are always locked.

Berejiklian is one of the most vocal supporters of the “national plan”, which Scott Morrison now happily claims as his own, as he too pushes to the end of blockages.

But many nuances were missed in the rhetoric. Morrison has been pushing the plan all week as an exit from Australia, speaking of ending lockdowns as the nation “comes out of the cave.” But yesterday, the Minister of Finance, Simon Birmingham, admitted that the Doherty Institute’s analysis on which the plan is based includes “targeted lockdowns” in the event of failure of the test, follow-up, isolation and quarantine. With NSW’s contact tracing system under immense pressure, test results failing to come back for days and mysterious cases by the hundreds every day, NSW’s test-trace-isolate-quarantine system did not hold up. to this epidemic. Under Doherty Institute modeling, this could still result in a targeted lockdown.

Morrison also wants to start shifting responsibility for handling Australia’s pandemic onto the states as he prepares for the next election. He set Christmas as a goal for “everyone to be around the table” (minus those overseas, with no plans to open the international border anytime soon), but the Doherty report defines all states and territories reaching the 70 to 80% eligible. vaccination target of the population, as well as the national average. With states that have been largely immune to mass epidemics not seeing the same vaccination surge as Victoria and NSW, that means not everyone will achieve these marks at the same time.

It is not surprising that the federal government does not yet talk much about it. But it comes.

We’ll cover everything that happens and more, with Mike Bowers, Katharine Murphy, Sarah Martin, Daniel Hurst and Paul karp at your service, backed, as always, by all the trusted Brains Guardian. Amy Remeikis is with you for the day. I’ve only had one coffee so far after waking up a bit later than usual so I have a bit to catch up on. Still, it’s shaping up to be at least another five-coffee day.

Ready?

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