But then there was a lot of pushback from ordinary Australians. All the details haven't come out, but apparently, Djokovic had been granted an exemption on health grounds. Australia requires everyone who comes into the country to be vaccinated. He showed up to defend his title at the Australian Open in Melbourne and ended up in immigration detention.īEAUBIEN: Yeah. SIMON: Jason, Australia has some of the toughest anti-COVID restrictions in the world, and Novak Djokovic, the great tennis player, discovered this on Wednesday. So that's obviously a big difference from lockdowns that we saw earlier in the pandemic. You know, in other places, quarantine requirements are shorter or maybe even nonexistent for people who are vaccinated. So in the Philippines, for instance, there's this new order that the unvaccinated must stay at home except for attending to essential tasks. It's that they're trying to keep the hospitals from overflowing.īEAUBIEN: And one other key thing now is that many of these new restrictions - they're applied differently between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. It's not like they think they want to eliminate COVID. So it's very much the case in most European countries. TOM HALE: Now they're being used, really, to try to ease pressure off of health care systems during surges. And apart from China and a few other places, he says the goal of these current COVID mandates, restrictions - it's no longer to try to stop viral transmission entirely. He runs a project called the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker. SIMON: Are there differences between the restrictions we're seeing now and those that existed earlier in the pandemic?īEAUBIEN: Yeah, the restrictions now have a very different goal from the early days of the pandemic. So while this isn't happening everywhere, you are seeing a tightening of COVID social measures in many places around the globe. They're even, like, sending out soldiers to enforce it. In South America, Peru's imposing a new nightly curfew. Then in Ontario, Canada, the province this week shut down schools, closed bars, gyms, museums. And when cases are popping up in Hong Kong, the city has been locking down entire apartment complexes until everybody gets tested. You know, even Hong Kong residents are not allowed to return to the city unless they quarantine for 21 days at their own expense at a government-approved hotel. Hong Kong has basically banned all foreigners from entering the city. You know, in several cities in China, people have been ordered not to leave their homes at all for several days at a time. We're talking about a lot of lockdowns too, right? What do they look like?īEAUBIEN: Yeah, in some places, full-on lockdowns are back. JASON BEAUBIEN, BYLINE: It's good to be here. NPR global health correspondent Jason Beaubien joins us. With that comes a series of new government restrictions in country after country. According to the World Health Organization, there's been a 70% increase in COVID-19 cases over the course of a week. COVID infections are surging around the world.
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