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Australia’s second-largest city will emerge from its coronavirus lockdown at midnight tomorrow after nearly four months under onerous restrictions after no new daily cases or deaths were recorded.
Stay-at-home orders for Melbourne’s five million residents will be eliminated and restaurants, beauty salons and retail stores will be allowed to open.
Melbourne and the surrounding state of Victoria saw the first 24-hour period of no new Covid-19 cases since June 8 before security bugs at quarantined hotels hosting international returnees triggered a major outbreak in July. .
Announcing the long-awaited relaxation of restrictions, the voice of Victoria’s state prime minister, Daniel Andrews, broke when he declared that it was an “emotional day.”
“This has been a very difficult year. And the Victorians have given a lot and I am proud of each one of them,” he told reporters in Melbourne.
When asked if beer-loving Victorians could now “jump on the beers,” Andrews said “it could go a little higher on the shelf.”
Melbourne became the epicenter of the country’s second coronavirus wave, with new daily cases surpassing 700 in August, as the rest of Australia was already easing restrictions.
Some restrictions were already lifted last week, allowing haircuts and golf games to return, but additional easing planned for Sunday was delayed 24 hours to evaluate thousands of test results after a small outbreak in the North of the city.
Andrews said all the tests were negative.
“It was worth the wait to have absolute confidence to be sure that our team had its arms around those positive cases and fundamental control of the outbreak and that is exactly what these numbers show us,” he said.
Pressure had mounted for weeks on state authorities to allow the city more freedoms, with a litany of rules remaining in place as they took a cautious approach to reopening despite declining cases.
The rest of the state of Victoria already enjoys fewer restrictions, with gyms reopening and live outdoor music resuming starting Tuesday.
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Travel restrictions between Melbourne and the Victoria region will be lifted as of November 8, and a 25-kilometer travel radius for residents of the city will also be lifted on the same day.
The state remains isolated from the rest of Australia, where regional authorities have largely adopted a hypervigilant response to Covid-19, such as maintaining restrictions on internal borders.
These measures have drawn criticism from some quarters.
Yesterday, Conservative Prime Minister Scott Morrison launched a partisan coup against the center-left Andrews government, claiming that Victoria’s restrictions had caused “1,000 job losses a day.”
Overall, Australia has been relatively successful in containing the spread of the coronavirus, with approximately 27,500 cases and 905 deaths in a population of 25 million.
The country also maintains strict controls at its international borders to prevent transmission of the virus from abroad, which has left tens of thousands of its own citizens stranded abroad.
Authorities now hope to remove domestic travel restrictions, bring more Australians home from abroad, and create “travel bubbles” with other countries that have curbed the virus while continuing to keep the number of cases low.
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