NT’s travel restrictions for Melbourne may remain for another fortnight, says chief health officer Hugh Heggie
The NT’s chief health officer has flagged Melburnians may not be allowed to travel freely to the NT for another fortnight, which means visitors from there could miss out on blockbuster events like the Darwin Supercars.
Northern Territory
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THE Northern Territory’s chief health officer has flagged Melburnians may not be allowed to travel freely to the NT for another fortnight, which means visitors from there could miss out on blockbuster events like the Darwin Supercars.
Fresh out from his two-week quarantine stay, chief health officer Hugh Heggie provided advice about the situation in Melbourne this morning.
It comes after Victoria recorded no new local cases on Friday as restrictions eased across Melbourne.
The NT removed restrictions for travellers coming from regional Victoria earlier this week but people arriving from Melbourne are still required to complete 14-day mandatory quarantine.
Dr Heggie said he would like to see two more consecutive weeks of zero new Covid-19 cases before he’s comfortable lifting the NT’s hot spot declaration on Melbourne.
“Their lockdown is to reduce transmission and also allow contact tracing to occur but we probably got to wait a couple more weeks before what we consider the control should be,” he said.
“If you think about those early days, we talked about replication cycles, which is 14 days or less but now we’re talking about some variants that are much more infectious, twice as infectious as the original virus.
“The 14 days will not be an uncommon cycle to wait and cross reference that with wastewater testing, which there is still positive wastewater testing in Melbourne.
“I think we’ve seen how quickly just a single case can explode into hundreds of cases and we’re so fortunate to be back were we seem to be before.”
Chief Minister Michael Gunner said he didn’t think any of the Top End’s upcoming dry season events are “at risk” because of the recent hot spot decisions that have been made.
“We have got a huge dry season calendar, we’ve got hotels and other events fully booked out,” he said.
“We want our Victorians and our Melbourne friends to be here if they can, if it keeps Territorians safe but none of those events are at risk because of the decisions were made to do that.”
Hospitality NT boss Alex Bruce said they have seen hundreds of hotel room cancellations in Darwin since the hot spot declaration was made.
“While more rooms last weekend were able to be resold as last minute bookings there has been an overall drop throughout the week and this weekend has lower numbers anticipated than previously booked,” he said.
“If the NT Government is going to wait 14 days of no community transmission in all of Melbourne before changing restrictions this will have an escalating impact on our numbers right through and beyond the Supercars.
“Why can’t the same successful hotspot regime come back rather than disproportionately locking out over five million Australians?”
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