A woman from Sydney, Australia, who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 has been blocked from visiting her daughter as she battles an advanced breast cancer diagnosis.
Katarina Anderson is vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot and has tested negative for COVID-19 four times since July 19. The 62-year-old mother applied for a compassionate exemption about three weeks ago in hopes of traveling to Melbourne to visit her daughter, Georgie Hudson, who is also raising two children with her husband.
Anderson said she applied for the travel exemption, “as I believe I am the only solution to help my daughter and her family cope through this devastating set of circumstances.”
The mother indicated she would quarantine for 14 days once she arrived in Melbourne. But that wasn’t enough.
“I was devastated,” she told Sky News Australia. “It’s the most frustrating thing having your daughter and the kids in that situation and I’m wanting to be emotionally, physically helpful and I’m sitting here waiting.”
Hudson’s husband, Kael, said his wife — who began chemotherapy July 29 — had “a bit of a breakdown on Friday night, when she got the news that her mum couldn’t come down.”
“She had been really holding onto that,” he said, “having her mum with her and having that denied is hard to get your head around.”
“I don’t understand how that system is working,” Kael continued. “You see public cases of international people coming out for reality TV shows, or our leaders travelling overseas and coming back, but a mother who is fully vaccinated and willing to do quarantine can’t travel from Sydney to Melbourne to look after her daughter.”
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Kael told the news outlet his wife will soon being losing her hair as a result of the treatment, which he said will be “a real sort of loss of identity … and not having her mother or see any friends or people outside of our household because of lockdown is really tough.”
A health department spokesperson defended the decision by saying exemptions “are extremely limited and only granted in very special circumstances, such as in end-of-life situations or for emergency needs.”
“Public health officers assessing exemption requests for the purposes of providing care to someone will take into account whether there are already people providing that care,” the representative said.
Anderson’s request — and subsequent denial — comes as Melbourne, the second largest city in Australia, enters its sixth lockdown. Officials in Melbourne and the surrounding state of Victoria announced the seven-day lockdown after eight new infections were detected in the city, ABC News reported last week. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews implemented the draconian measures with less than four hour’s notice.
“To be frank, we don’t have enough people that have been vaccinated and, therefore, this is the only option available to us,” he said. “The time will come when we have many more options. But that isn’t now.”
Sydney is under even stricter lockdown orders, according to CNBC.
Residents of Sydney, the most populous city in Australia, have been ordered to stay home until at least Aug. 28. In late July, Australian soldiers were dispatched alongside officers with the New South Wales Police Force to patrol the streets in and around Sydney.
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