Sydney – Australian authorities extended a lockdown in Sydney on Wednesday by at least 14 days, after three weeks of initial restrictions failed to stamp out the biggest outbreak of COVID-19 this year in the country’s largest city.
New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian said restrictions would need to remain in place until at least July 30.
“It always hurts to say this, but we need to extend the lockdown at least further two weeks,” Berejiklian said in Sydney on Wednesday.
“We want to get out of this lockdown as soon as we can and that is why we have the settings in place that we have.”
The shutdown has now been extended on two occasions and total infections since the first was initially detected in the city’s eastern suburbs in mid-June now stand at just under 900. Two deaths have been reported, the first for the country this year.
Berejiklian has repeatedly said that the lockdown, in place since June 26, will only be lifted when the number of newly reported cases that were circulating in the community while infectious were close to zero.
The harbour city of 5 million residents was plunged into an initial two-week lockdown in late June.
Many non-essential businesses are closed, and most school students are staying home, with residents only allowed outside their homes for essential activities and some exercise.
Neighbouring Victoria state, which spent nearly a third of 2020 under lockdown as the centre of Australia’s first wave of COVID-19 cases, meanwhile reported its biggest daily case increase in weeks, all linked to a team of removalists who carried the virus interstate from Sydney.
Among the seven new cases in the state, one person attended a football match at Melbourne Cricket Ground while contagious, making the country’s biggest sports stadium a designated exposure site, the authorities said.
Hundreds of people in the state had been ordered into isolation and an apartment block visited by the removalists was locked down. Investigators were checking for clues of possible contacts, but there was no indication of plans for wider movement restrictions.
