COVID-19: NZ says fall in cases shows curbs working

Wellington, Sep 02: New Zealand on Thursday recorded a drop in new COVID-19 infections, which the authorities said showed that a strict nationwide lockdown was working to curb the spread of the virulent delta variant of the coronavirus.

New Zealand saw 49 new cases on Thursday, all limited to the hotspot of Auckland.

"The latest lower number is encouraging and does show that our alert level 4 lockdown is working even against the delta," the Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told reporters.

DW has more on the latest pandemic developments from around the world.

Asia

India on Thursday saw its biggest single-day spike in coronavirus cases in two months. The country has reported 47,092 new COVID-19 infections over the last 24 hours, the government said in a statement.

In Japan, Fumio Kishida, who is challenging Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga as the governing party chief, has called for an economic stimulus package worth "tens of trillions of yen" to cushion the blow to the Japanese economy from the coronavirus pandemic.

Kishida, a former foreign minister, also said the country must maintain ultra-low interest rates to aid the pandemic-hit economy.

Meanwhile, Taiwan has received its first lot of BioNTech-Pfizer's COVID-19 jabs. The 930,000 doses are the first of the 15 million vaccines acquired by Foxconn, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Buddhist charity Tzu Chi foundation, in negotiations with a China-based distributor after months of contention.

While the US and Japan donated several million doses to Taiwan in June, the island has struggled to vaccinate its 23.5 million people. Taiwan's complicated political statushas been a major obstacle in the vaccine rollout.

Europe

Germany on Thursday registered 13,715 new cases of coronavirus, according to data published by the Robert Koch Institute. The total number of COVID-19 infections now stands at 3,970,102. The country reported 33 new deaths, taking the total to 92,256.

Oceania

Doctors in Australia have warned that the country's hospitals are not ready to cope with the government's plans to ease restrictions.

The Australian Medical Association (AMA) said on Thursday that the health system was facing the risk of being locked into a "permanent cycle of crisis."

The organization called for a new model to check if the level of staffing in the hospitals can withstand a spike in cases, which is expected when the lockdown eases.

"If you have opened up and you haven't looked at the safety nets or the life rafts that we've got, we might end up actually trying to push more people on the life rafts and capsizing them," AMA Vice President Chris Moy told ABC.

Source: DW