Australia cannot afford to lift its strict social distancing measures until the health system can cope with a large outbreak of community transmission of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, according to Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy. Australia has 6,457 confirmed cases of COVID-19; around half of those have recovered while 63 have died and 42 are on ventilators.
Mr Murphy told reporters on Thursday while Australia’s figures are “encouraging” restrictions cannot be lifted until its public health response gets “even stronger.”
"Unless we are prepared as a nation to detect those outbreaks really early and get on top of them and controlled them and isolate the cases and quarantined the contacts, we could end up with large community outbreaks that could lead to situations like we've all seen every night on the Nightly News in high income countries with good health systems like the USA and the UK," he said.
"We can't afford to do relaxation until we have a public health system which is so finely tuned that it can detect and respond to any outbreak."
Professor Murphy said one of the major reasons Australia's infection rate is so low relative to other countries is because of the early response during the nascent stage of the pandemic but the public cannot "afford to be complacent."
Prime Minister Scott Morrison confirmed said he has “no plans” to change the current lockdown measures for at least another four weeks.
Image: News Corp Australia
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