April 6, 2022 | By Bronwen Largier
The state government announced yesterday that it would remove the requirement to be vaccinated in order to enter hospitality venues, showgrounds, stadiums, cinemas, galleries and museums from 1am on April 14.
Since Queensland opened its state border to all other Australian regions in December 2021, unvaccinated people have been banned from attending restaurants, pubs, theatres, event venues, festivals and outdoor tourism experiences.
It is not specifically stated whether the lifting of restrictions next week will apply to festivals and outdoor tourism experiences.
“It’s time to reunite Queensland,” said Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk yesterday.
“The restrictions we had in place did their job.
“The chief health officer is comfortable given where we are in the current wave that these restrictions can ease from next Thursday,” she said.
The state’s chief health officer Dr John Gerrard said there was “clear evidence from multiple sources” that the secondary Omicron wave was subsiding. Seventy-five per cent of the latest sequenced cases of COVID in the state are the Omicron BA.2 subvariant.
“Now that we’ve reached greater than 90 per cent of those over the age of 12 vaccinated, it is time for us to move on,” said Gerrard.
“This particular measure has no public health benefit now because of the proportion of people that are vaccinated.”
Queensland Health Minister Yvette D’Ath said the government believed these restrictions would not need to be reinstated going forward.
“We are lifting this at a time that we have confidence that these restrictions will stay off. We didn’t want these restrictions coming and going, we wanted to give business certainty and we want to give business notice and that’s why we are announcing this today.”
Along with the requirement to be vaccinated, the need to check in to venues in Queensland is also ending next week.