Page 2559 - Week 09 - Thursday, 16 September 2021
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COVID-19 positive case with an unknown source of infection in the community. Since this time, we have recorded over 500 cases, over 130,000 tests have been conducted, and, unfortunately, many Canberrans have been hospitalised, including requiring treatment in the intensive care unit. This is the most significant public health challenge we have ever faced as a city.
I thank every Canberran who has done the right thing in support of the lockdown effort. It has been an amazing community effort to protect our families, our friends and our cities. The efforts have managed to stop our outbreaks becoming an exponential outbreak like we have witnessed in New South Wales and Victoria. We are in a race to vaccinate as many Canberrans as we can, as quickly as we can. ACT government clinics are now administering over 27,000 doses a week, and every vaccination is one step closer to a safer Canberra.
But there remain many people who are yet to get vaccinated. In the ACT and across the world what we are seeing is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Vaccines are providing protection to people, their families and communities every day, but there is still a risk for tens of thousands of Canberrans who have not yet had the opportunity to get vaccinated. That is why I have been clear that we face a difficult two months ahead. Until we reach 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the eligible population fully vaccinated, strong public health measures, effective testing, rapid contact tracing, effective isolation and quarantine measures are the tools we have at hand to avoid our local outbreak exponentially increasing—with the commensurate hospitalisations and deaths that that would cause.
Based on the severe public health risk that remains in the territory and the Canberra region, the Chief Health Officer has now confirmed that the ACT lockdown should be further extended for a four-week period until Friday, 15 October. It is a difficult time for all Canberrans—for families, for friends and for businesses—and the next few weeks in particular will be challenging. The government and all of the professional and hard-working officials that assist us understand the impact the decision to impose strict public health restrictions has had.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. With our high and increasing levels of vaccine take-up, Canberrans can be confident that there will be better times before the end of the year—holiday time with loved ones, a staged return to regular schooling and a more normal working life. As the Doherty Institute modelling has shown, there are three effective measures to combat this virus: reducing the movement of people; testing, tracing, isolating and quarantining; and, most importantly, vaccination.
National cabinet has agreed to a national plan to transition Australia’s national COVID-19 response, as we gradually shift from existing pre-vaccination settings, which were focused on continued suppression of community transmission of the virus, to post-vaccination settings focused on the prevention of serious illness, hospitalisation and fatalities. Of course, central to this plan is vaccinating as many people as possible as soon as possible. We are treating this as a race; we always have treated this as a race. The national plan outlines targets of 70 per cent and 80 per cent of double-dosed, fully-vaccinated coverage of people aged 16 years and over. I have made it clear that the ACT is focused on reaching well above 80 per cent vaccination
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