On Monday, Australia’s Health Department chief Brendan Murphy was asked whether the international border would open in 2021, and his answer didn’t give us much hope.
“I think that that is a big question. I think that the answer is probably no,” he said.
“I think that we’ll go most of this year with still substantial border restrictions, even if we have a lot of the population vaccinated.”
Murphy says the reason Australians will not be permitted to leave the country for travel is because it’s still unclear whether people vaccinated against COVID-19 can spread the virus to others.
However, Murphy said he was reluctant to predict more than two or three months ahead.
“The world is changing,” he said. “I think at the moment, we’ve got this light at the end of the tunnel – the vaccine – so we’re going to go as safely and as fast as we can to get our population vaccinated and then we’ll look at what happens.”
It comes just weeks after Qantas reopened ticket sales for international flights from July.
“We continue to review and update our international schedule in response to the developing COVID-19 situation,” Qantas said in a statement.
“Recently we have aligned the selling of our international services to reflect our expectation that international travel will begin to restart from July 2021.”
