CANBERRA, April 3 (Xinhua) -- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has described a recent slowdown in the spread of coronavirus in Australia as "promising" and "encouraging."
There had been 5,224 confirmed cases of the virus in Australia as of Friday morning - an increase of about 5 percent from Thursday morning.
However, while the rate of infection has been slowed the death toll has more than doubled from 13 to 27 in a single week.
Morrison said that if the number of cases had continued to increase by more than 20 percent per day - as they did for most of March - then Australia would have already exceeded 10,000 cases.
"There would be over 5,000 more cases," he said.
"That is a tribute to the work that has been done by Australians in getting around and supporting the very sensible measures that have been put in place all around the country by the state and territory governments.
"Right now that trajectory is promising, it's encouraging.
"But there's no guarantees, I want to stress. This virus writes its own rules."
Recent international travel is still responsible for the majority of Australian cases of the virus but Brendan Murphy, Australia's chief medical officer, said that community transmissions "have been growing and are still growing slowly."
He said that it means that there are people in the community "who have COVID-19 who don't know it and that is why we introduced these social distancing measures we've all been taken to heart very well."
