SYDNEY: Sydney will enter a hard two-week lockdown on Saturday (Jun 26) night as authorities try to contain a fast-spreading outbreak of the highly infectious Delta coronavirus variant in Australia’s largest city, the state premier said.
More than a million people in downtown Sydney and the city’s eastern suburbs were already under lockdown due to the outbreak, but health authorities said they needed to expand that after more COVID-19 cases were recorded, with exposure sites increasing beyond the initial areas of concern.
The lockdown, announced by New South Wales state premier Gladys Berejiklian, will also include the regions of Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong, which surround Sydney.
The curbs on Sydney, home to more than five million people, are the latest in a streak of short but hard lockdowns that have been imposed in Australia’s cities in recent months to fight small outbreaks of the coronavirus.
Under the rules in place through Jul 9, people can leave home for essential work, medical care, education or shopping. The rest of the state will have limits on public gatherings and masks will be obligatory indoors.
“There was no point doing it for three days or five days because it wouldn’t have done the job,” Berejiklian told a news briefing.
The New South Wales state reported 29 locally acquired COVID-19 cases on Saturday.
Saturday’s data includes 17 infections in the country’s most populous state that were already announced on Friday, taking the number of infections linked to the Bondi outbreak to 80.
Australia has been more highly successful in managing the pandemic than many other advanced economies through swift border closures, social distancing rules and a high community compliance with them, reporting just over 30,400 cases and 910 COVID-19 deaths.
But the country has struggled significantly with the vaccination rollout and small outbreaks continue. On Friday, the government granted a provisional approval for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, potentially expanding its supply options.
“The situation is worsening beyond what we would have liked to have seen this morning, and the reason for that is that the new exposure sites are outside of those areas of concern we had highlighted,” Berejiklian had earlier said in a news briefing.
“There is concern that some of those cases may have been exposed for a number of days without the person knowing they had the virus, and that where our concern is.”
On Saturday, the case of a worker at the Granites gold mine in the Tanami Desert of the Northern Territory prompted the territory’s authorities to order the isolation of more than 1,600 people in three states who had had contact with the worker.
The mine, owned by Newmont Corp, was put into lockdown.
