SYDNEY: Downtown Sydney and the city’s eastern suburbs, which include Bondi Beach, will go into a one-week lockdown from midnight Friday (Jun 25) as authorities struggle to contain a spike in the highly contagious Delta COVID-19 virus in the city.
The Australian Medical Association (AMA) said the move was not enough and called for a complete lockdown of the city.
People who live or work in four local government council areas in Sydney have been ordered to stay at home except for urgent reasons, New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney on Friday.
People are allowed to leave their homes only for essential work, education, grocery shopping or outdoor exercise.
“We don’t want to see this situation linger for weeks, we would like to see this situation end sooner rather than later,” Berejiklian said.
Authorities said they were “concerned” about a potential super-spreaders event in a salon where three staff were infected and over 900 clients visited between Jun 15 and Jun 23.
Officials have issued health alerts overnight for more than a dozen new venues scattered across Sydney, Australia’s largest city and home to a fifth of Australia’s 25 million population, as total infections in the outbreak topped 60.
NSW has held off calls for a hard lockdown, instead of imposing mandatory masks in all indoor locations in Sydney, including offices, restricted residents in seven council areas from leaving the city, and limited home gatherings to five.
These restrictions, which were scheduled to end on Wednesday, are now extended until midnight on Jul 2.
Twenty-two local cases were reported on Friday, the biggest rise in infections since the first case was detected in Bondi last Wednesday in a limousine driver who transported an overseas airline crew.
NSW has been effectively isolated from the rest of the country after other states reinstated tough border rules in response to the latest outbreak, including a total ban for visitors from Sydney’s virus-hit suburbs.
Neighbouring Queensland and Victoria authorities on Friday said several passengers from Sydney who attempted to enter the states by air without exemptions were sent back to Sydney.
Victoria reported no new local COVID-19 cases beyond the two announced on Thursday, likely linked to the Sydney outbreak. Two local cases were detected in Queensland overnight, both in home quarantine.
A conference of the Australian Banking Association in Sydney where Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe was due to speak next week has been postponed by the organizers due to COVID-related curbs.
