Australia’s Prime Minister said that isolation for ‘close contact’ of Covid-19 cases is now redundant. The totalitarian now wants to scrap the mandate as the country seeks to move on to a new phase where Covid-19 will be treated as an endemic illness, like the flu.
Last year, the government summoned the Australian military to relocate people in the Northern Territory with COVID-19 and their “close contacts” to quarantine camps or what people mostly called the ‘concentration camps.’
Hidden camera footage was leaked from inside a forced Covid-19 quarantine camp in Australia where the Aussie officials were seen giving a warning to a woman that if she walks off her balcony onto the path next to her confinement shelter, it’s a $5,000 fine.
On Friday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison met with the national cabinet of state and federal leaders to discuss plans regarding Covid-19, including scrapping the rules for isolation of close contacts.
ABC reported:
Scott Morrison, premiers and chief ministers asked the nation’s top medical taskforce, the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC), to consider exactly when isolation rules for close contacts could be scrapped.
“It’s starving businesses of staff, of hospitals of staff, and all of these things — although for the health sector, there have been some exemptions,” Mr Morrison told reporters today in Sydney.
“That rule is becoming, we believe as leaders, redundant.
“So we’ve tasked the medical expert panel to say we want your urgent advice on this as soon as possible, because we’d like to say goodbye to that rule as quickly as we can.”
Mr Morrison said with the winter virus season approaching, maintaining the status quo was unsustainable.
“Particularly with the kids back at school — I mean, we all know what it’s like with kids and flus and other things that, you know, they bring it home and then the whole family has to stay home and can’t go to work,” he said.
Aside from changing the rules for close contact isolation, the meeting also discussed moving the country to “Phase D” of the national pandemic response plan – meaning “living with COVID-19 as though it were the flu.”
Reuters reported:
A day after meeting with the national cabinet of state and federal leaders, Morrison told reporters on Saturday morning they had discussed moving to “Phase D” of the national pandemic response plan.
“Our airports are open again, international arrivals can come, there are waivers now on quarantine for people returning, so we are pretty much in Phase D,” he said.
The leaders wanted to drop the isolation requirement for close contacts of COVID-19 cases and would seek further advice on this from an expert panel, he said.
The isolation rule was “starving businesses of staff”, said Morrison, whose conservative government faces an election in May.