As we’re all craving a return to normalcy from COVID-19 restrictions, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has warned that we may not see the return of mass gatherings until at least 2021, if not longer.
Don’t get your heart set on your holiday to Bali, yet, and you might wait to purchase any tickets to concerts that have already been rescheduled for later this year, and don’t think that regulations are going to be drastically reduced, as a chief health officer has warned that mass gatherings probably won’t occur until the new year, or perhaps until there is an inoculation.
In a recent interview with The Age, Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton warned that “MCG-type” gatherings, including concerts, could still be off-limits for “quite some time”.
Even though Victoria has been seeing a continual decrease in the number of active cases of COVID-19 for over a week, and only one new case confirmed on Thursday the 16th of April, Professor Sutton acknowledged that one case can still spark fire, as it only took one case in Wuhan to ignite into a global pandemic.
Although Victoria is scheduled for a review of the current social distancing regulations on May 11th, Professor Sutton noted that residents shouldn’t be expecting a mass removal of regulations, rather see the regulations as “three or four or five or six layers peeled off over some months.”
“You could probably go out for other things where you haven’t got that gathering of people, other activities where you can keep that distance,” he continued, “but there’ll be [regulations] in place that constrains us until there’s a vaccine.”
“It only took one infected person in China for the 2 million cases we’ve got today — there’s probably 10 million — and we will head in that direction if we take the brakes off.”
As for international travel, Professor Sutton notes that he thinks”that’s the thing that is going to be constrained for a long time,” as each country has had different approaches to containing the virus.
For more information about the global pandemic of COVID-19, please see the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention, or in other words, continue to stay home.
