Sydney’s COVID-19 Lockdown to End Sooner for the Vaccinated

Sydney’s COVID-19 Lockdown to End Sooner for the Vaccinated

Australian authorities announced plans on Monday to gradually reopen locked-down Sydney, unveiling a two-tiered system that will give citizens inoculated for COVID-19 more freedoms than their unvaccinated neighbors for several weeks.

Movement restrictions across New South Wales, the country's most populous state and home to Sydney, will be lifted gradually between Oct. 11 and Dec. 1 as vaccination rates push through 70%, 80% and 90%.

However, people who are not fully inoculated will be barred from joining the vaccinated to resume community sports, dining out, shopping and other activities until the final date.

"Unlike most cases in the world, if you are not vaccinated you will have to wait at least four or five weeks ... in order to participate in things that the rest of us can participate in," state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said in a televised briefing.

"If you want to be able to have a meal with friends and welcome people in your home, you have to get vaccinated."

Berejiklian did not detail how the block on activity by the unvaccinated would be enforced.

Sydney, along with Melbourne and Canberra, has been in lockdown for several weeks, with the three cities bearing the brunt of a third wave of COVID-19 infections that has