Australia's border restrictions likely to remain for most of 2021, says Health Secretary

Australia's Health Department Secretary Professor Brendan Murphy on Monday said it is likely that border restrictions will be tightened for most of 2021 even after many people get vaccinated.

"I think that we'll go most of this year with still substantial border restrictions even if we have a lot of the population vaccinated, we don't know whether that will prevent transmission of the virus. And it's likely that quarantine will continue for some time," CNN quoted Murphy as saying.

"I don't want to predict more than two or three months ahead. The world is changing," Murphy said. "So I think at the moment, we've got this light at the end of the tunnel the vaccine. So we're going to go as safely and as fast as we can to get our population vaccinated and then we'll look at what happens."

According to CNN, Australia has been widely successful at containing the Covid-19 outbreak and has implemented some of the toughest border restrictions since the outbreak began.

The total number of coronavirus cases reported in Australia is 28,721, while the death toll stands at 909, according to the Johns Hopkins University.

( With inputs from ANI )