Iran Press/ Asia: This measure is taken despite a slight drop in new infections as Australia's two biggest cities fight to stop the spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, Reuters reported.
According to abc.net.au, Victoria's lockdown will be extended beyond Tuesday night after the state recorded 13 new local COVID cases, but Premier Daniel Andrews has not put a timeframe on when it lifts.
Four more new cases have been detected this morning among people already in isolation, and will be officially reported tomorrow.
All new cases are linked to the current outbreak and includes one in the regional town of Mildura that was announced yesterday.
A second case has also been confirmed in Mildura.
The results were detected among 54,839 tests received on Sunday, and there were 14,758 vaccine doses administered at state-run sites.
"We will not be ready to lift this lockdown at midnight tomorrow night," Andrews said.
"Exactly how much more time, that advice is not with me yet, those decisions have not been made yet.
"We are not able to tell you today, but we will tell you tomorrow.
"I hope that will be as early tomorrow as possible.
"We know that if we had been open then we would be just like Sydney, and have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cases and we would not be looking at a short lockdown, we would be looking at something entirely different."
I know that this is not the news that people want to hear, but you've got to do the right thing, this thing is moving so fast, it's so challenging, it's so dynamic.
Meetings will be held to determine the rules and timelines for lifting the lockdown.
Andrews said 15,800 primary close contacts had been identified and are in isolation.
More than 3,000 of those are people who were at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) on the day a positive case attended, and a further 1,800 attended a rugby match at AAMI Park where an infected person was in attendance.
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