Australia will immediately deliver 8,000 Covid-19 vaccine doses and critical health equipment to Papua New Guinea (PNG) due to spike in new coronavirus infections in the country, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Wednesday.
It will also request AstraZeneca and European authorities to grant access to one million doses of the nationally contracted vaccines for PNG, Morrison said.
Australia will also suspend all charter flights for two weeks from midnight Wednesday and outbound travel to the country, the prime minister said:
“We are suspending all charter flights from Papua New Guinea to Australia, with limited exemptions for medevac and other critical flights.
We are lowering passenger limits by a quarter for flights from Port Moresby to Brisbane, starting at midnight tonight.
We are suspending all exemptions for Australian outbound travel to Papua New Guinea, except for essential and critical workers, including humanitarian and medical activities. “
Of particular concern are fly-in-fly-out workers commuting between PNG and the northern state of Queensland.
Morrison added:
“We will enhance the medical support we provide by donating essential personal protective equipment to PNG. That includes 1 million surgical masks, 200,000 P295 masks, 100,000 gowns, 100,000 glasses, 100,000 pairs of gloves, 100,000 bottles of disinfectant, 20,000 face shields, and 200 non-invasive ventilators.
Our government will also promptly donate 8,000 doses of our Covid-19 vaccine stocks from our domestic stocks to support the vaccination of primary care health workers in PNG starting next week. “
Australia’s chief medical officer, Paul Kelly, added that the situation in PNG got worse:
The situation in Papua New Guinea has changed very rapidly in recent weeks.
Of the cases diagnosed in PNG, half have been diagnosed in the past few weeks, from the start of the pandemic. Recognizing that they didn’t have the resources for mass testing like we have in Australia, any number you see from Papua New Guinea of cases and even deaths will be a gross underestimate. There is a major outbreak of Covid-19 in Papua New Guinea. We know this from the places where tests can be done.
He says half of the women admitted to hospitals in Port Moresby for pregnancy are positive. A large number of health workers have also been infected, he says.
Below you can read more about the situation for pregnant women at Port Moresby General Hospital: