homes destroyed as Australia bushfire rages near locked-down Perth Pakistan health workers to begin receiving Chinese-made vaccine

7 min readFeb 3, 2021

At least 71 homes have been destroyed in a bushfire raging out of control near Australia’s fourth-biggest city Perth, authorities said Wednesday, as they told residents to ignore a coronavirus lockdown and leave threatened areas.

The blaze has torn through swathes of land in the Perth Hills and was moving towards more densely populated areas.

Six firefighters received minor injuries — including one who officials said suffered burns and continued working to extinguish the blaze — but no deaths or serious injuries have been reported so far.

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“To the people who have lost their homes, it’s just devastating for them. Our thoughts go out to them,” Western Australian fire commissioner Darren Klemm said.

Several emergency warnings were issued, with conditions set to worsen later Wednesday and strong gusting winds expected to fan the flames.

The blaze hit a population that had just been forced into a snap lockdown after a coronavirus case was detected. About two million people in and around Perth fell under the stay-at-home orders imposed on Sunday.

“This is a situation the likes of which we have never seen before,” said Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan.

“A full lockdown and raging bushfires. It is frighting and it will test us all.”

No new virus cases have been detected since the lockdown began, but the number of homes lost is still expected to rise slightly.

As the fire front edged nearer to more populated areas, Klemm called on locals to act swiftly to escape the potentially deadly blaze despite the coronavirus restrictions.

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“What we don’t want is indecision from people about whether they should evacuate or not when we require them to evacuate,” he said.

“So that evacuation overrides any quarantining requirements that people may have.”

- ‘Like a bomb had gone off’

Hundreds of people have fled the area since the bushfire was sparked on Monday, with many sleeping in evacuation centres overnight.

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Among them was Peter Lavis, 68, who left two nights ago after watching distant smoke quickly transform the landscape until it “looked like a bomb had gone off”.

“We could see the fire clearly, the red glow and occasional rush of flames going up,” he told AFP.

“We had a little family conference and decided the best thing to do was to leave.”

Lavis said he believed his home was safe while a neighbour had reported his eldest daughter’s nearby house was also standing despite everything around it being burned.

“It’s some of the best news but also the saddest — a lot of people haven’t been so lucky,” he said.

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Bushfire smoke has blanketed Perth, about 30 kilometres west of the blaze which had a 75-kilometre (47-mile) perimeter Tuesday and has so far burned almost 10,000 hectares (24,700 acres).

“It was just scorched earth. Even where I was behind the fire, there was a lot of active burning because the crews just had to react so fast,” local mayor Kevin Bailey told public broadcaster ABC.

- Climate change threat -

Temperatures were forecast to peak at 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday before a predicted ex-tropical cyclone could bring rain and cooler temperatures but more unpredictable winds later this week.

Milder conditions overnight Tuesday had allowed firefighters to build containment lines in some areas, but Klemm cautioned there were “challenging times ahead”.

More than 200 firefighters are battling the bushfire supported by water-bombing aircraft.

More than 3.5 million hectares were burned across Western Australia during the country’s devastating 2019–2020 climate change-fuelled bushfires but the state was largely spared the loss of properties and lives seen in Australia’s more densely populated southeast.

Scientists said the layout of the Perth Hills left it particularly vulnerable to blazes made increasingly more dangerous by climate change, with large fires engulfing homes in the area four times since 2009.

“Urban-bushland living will increasingly mean living with bushfire threat as climate change brings with it more frequent high bushfire danger conditions days,” said Jim McLennan, a bushfire researcher at La Trobe University.

Pakistan will begin administering a Chinese-made Covid-19 vaccine to frontline health workers Wednesday, but the country is still months away from a mass roll-out.

Beijing has donated about 500,000 doses of the Sinopharm vaccine — which has yet to be fully approved by China’s health authorities — with a further million expected by the end of the month.

The country of 220 million has recorded more than half a million coronavirus cases, with around 11,000 deaths, but limited testing suggests true figures are likely much higher.

Lawmaker Nausheen Hamid, who leads parliament’s health committee, said a first phase of vaccinations would prioritise health workers.

“I can’t say with certainty, but we would still need around two months to start a mass vaccination campaign,” she added.

The Sindh province health authority said around 100 health workers nationwide had died since the virus reached the world’s fifth most populous country last spring.

Pulmonologist and Covid-19 expert Shazli Manzoor told AFP that the Chinese vaccine suited impoverished Pakistan because it could be stored at between two and eight degrees Celsius (36 and 46 Fahrenheit), compared to -70 degrees Celsius for other vaccines.

He said the government would set up special clinics to monitor how the population was responding to the vaccinations.

Some doctors have questioned how effective the vaccine will be.

“It lacks transparency and data compared to other vaccines,” one Pakistani health expert told AFP.

Up to 17 million doses of the British-Swedish produced AstraZeneca vaccine have been promised to Pakistan in the first half of 2021 under the Covax global pool, the government has said.

Pakistan was not included on a list of countries in the region to receive vaccines from neighbouring India, which is home to the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, the Serum Institute.

A doctor in Islamabad was the first health worker to receive the jab in a symbolic ceremony in front of Prime Minister Imran Khan on Tuesday night.

There will be no quick answers into the origins of the coronavirus, one of the World Health Organization experts on a mission to the Covid-19 ground zero in central China told AFP.

Hung Nguyen-Viet, who is visiting various virus-linked sites in the city of Wuhan with the team, said starting the investigation more than one year after the pandemic began was not ideal, but added that the mission was progressing well.

The politically sensitive trip — which Beijing had delayed throughout the first year of the pandemic — aims to explore how the virus first jumped from animals to humans before killing millions worldwide since it first emerged in Wuhan in late 2019.

But Nguyen-Viet said in a Zoom video interview that it was a “difficult question and a difficult study”, and the world should not expect quick answers.

“It is very unlikely that (in) such a short mission, (we) would have a very advanced understanding or definite answers to the question,” he said.

“So I think that we need to be patient, we are in a process, and we need time and effort to understand it.”

Nguyen-Viet, co-leader of the Animal and Human Health Program at Nairobi’s International Livestock Research Institute, also said it would have been preferable for the team to have visited Wuhan earlier.

“Obviously it is ideal to do the study at that time or right after,” he said.

More than a year has elapsed since the first cases of the then-unknown virus emerged in Wuhan, and the WHO team is only expected to spend around two weeks in total on the ground.

Since arriving in Wuhan, the group has been to a number of key sites — including hospitals that treated early Covid-19 patients and the now-infamous Huanan seafood market where the first cluster of infections emerged.

“We learned about the background, different cases at the market, so it helped me to construct the story and understand better the context of that market,” said Nguyen-Viet.

- Political pressure -

On Wednesday, the group visited the Wuhan Institute of Virology — another much-watched spot since its high-security lab has been linked with a number of conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus.

There was speculation early in the pandemic that it could have leaked from the lab, although there is no evidence to back up that theory.

Nguyen-Viet, an animal health specialist, said the team has already held meetings with Shi Zhengli, a key figure at the institute dubbed “China’s bat woman” for her extensive research into bat coronaviruses.

However, he said the team will not visit the remote caves in southwestern Yunnan province, where the closest relative to the virus — called RaTG13 — was found in bat droppings in 2013, according to a report from Shi.

Scientists think the coronavirus originated in bats and was likely transmitted to people via another mammal.

Bats have been a key topic of discussions during the WHO trip, Nguyen-Viet said.

Beijing is keen to shift focus from the early days of the pandemic to its recovery, and the WHO team spent several hours touring a propaganda exhibition celebrating China’s success against the virus.

But Nguyen-Viet — who admitted the team felt the global political pressure — tried to downplay expectations of any quick results.

“It’s an ongoing process,” he said. “And we focus on our work and we will see what comes out from this mission.”

homes destroyed as Australia bushfire rages near locked-down Perth Pakistan health workers to begin receiving Chinese-made vaccine

Written by Xakaf

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