Australia’s southern state of Victoria will enter into a one-week “circuit breaker” lockdown beginning Thursday as it deals with a new and growing outbreak of COVID-19 cases. The lockdown was ordered after health authorities announced 12 new confirmed cases in Melbourne, bringing the total number of infections in the state capital to 26. Acting state Premier James Merlino told reporters in Melbourne the new outbreak is due to “a highly infectious strain of the virus, a variant of concern, which is running faster than we have ever recorded.” The new cases are linked to an overseas traveler who became infected with a variant first detected in India during his mandatory hotel quarantine phase. Residents will only be allowed to leave their homes during their new lockdown for essential work, school, shopping, caregiving, exercise and medical reasons, including receiving their scheduled coronavirus vaccinations. The new lockdown is the fourth one imposed on Victoria state since the start of the pandemic. The most severe period occurred in mid-2020, which lasted more than three months as Victoria was under the grip of a second wave of COVID-19 infections that killed more than 800 people. Acting Premier Merlino had already imposed a new set of restrictions for Australia’s second-most populous state, including limits on public gathering sizes and mandatory mask wearing in restaurants, hotels and other indoor venues until June 4. New vaccine late-stage clinical trial Two European pharmaceutical giants, France’s Sanofi and Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline, announced Thursday that they are beginning a late-stage clinical trial of their experimental, recombinant COVID-19 vaccine after reporting positive results from a smaller scale trial. FILE – This file photo taken on Nov. 23, 2020, shows a bottle reading ‘Vaccine Covid-19’ next to French biopharmaceutical company Sanofi logo.The expanded trial will involve over 35,000 adults in Asia, Africa and Latin America and the United States. The drugmakers will test the efficacy of the new vaccine through a two-stage approach, the first on the original version of the coronavirus, while a second stage will target the B.1.351 variant that was first detected in South Africa. Tests will also be run on the Sanofi-GSK vaccine in the coming weeks to determine if it can be used as a booster shot for a previous inoculation, regardless of what vaccine a recipient had initially received. An official with Sanofi says the vaccine could be granted authorization for use in the last quarter of this year if the Stage 3 trials are successful.
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