Australia imposed new restrictions on Saturday on people who have been to nine southern African countries, as the new Omicron variant of COVID 19 raises concerns about another wave of the Pandemic.
The countries are South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Lesotho, Eswatini, the Seychelles, Malawi and Mozambique.
The government will ban non-citizens who have been in those countries from entering and require 14 day quarantines for Australian citizens and their dependents returning from the countries, according to Health Minister Greg Hunt.
The restrictions apply to international students and skilled migrants who have been in any of the nine countries within the past 14 days, as well as countries with which Australia has travel bubbles.
If medical evidence shows that further actions are required, we will not hesitate to take them. He said that there could be a possibility of strengthening or expanding the restrictions.
Anyone who has already arrived in Australia and who has been in any of those countries within the past 14 days must immediately be isolated and tested.
The Australian government will suspend all flights from the nine southern African countries for two weeks.
Almost twenty people from South Africa are being quarantined at the Northern Territory's Howard Springs facility, 19 of whom have returned negative coronaviruses tests. Hunt said that it is not yet known if the one positive test result is the Omicron variant.
The discovery of the variant - which has a spike protein that is different from the one that existing vaccines are based on -- triggered a global alarm on Friday as countries rushed to suspend travel from southern Africa and stock markets suffered their biggest falls in more than a year.
Australia has loosened its international border restrictions for the first time in the past few months, which allowed fully vaccinated residents to return to the country with no quarantine after higher vaccination levels.
Australia had largely stamped out infections for most of this year until an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant spread rapidly across its east in late June. So far, about 205,000 cases and 1,985 deaths have been recorded, which is lower than many other countries in the developed world.