SYDNEY: Christmas travel plans for thousands of Australians were thrown into chaos on Friday (Dec 18) when states and territories imposed border restrictions after 28 COVID-19 cases have been detected in Sydney, with fears infections may spread citywide.
A few quarters of a million people in Sydney’s northern beaches, where the cases have been discovered, have been told to remain house and wear masks if in other venues.
Restaurants within the space, which anticipated a lucrative Christmas trade, reported hundreds of cancellations, knocking prospects of economic recovery from earlier virus waves.
“Everyone in better Sydney needs to be on high alert,” New South Wales (NSW) state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told a news conference on Friday in announcing 10 new cases.
NSW health authorities issued an “urgent call” to all state residents to monitor for COVID-19 symptoms, saying confirmed cases from Sydney’s northern beaches had visited a number of places around Sydney, Australia’s most populous city.
Authorities have pinpointed two clubs at Avalon beach as the unique transmission sites, but are still trying to hunt down zero, and have issued more than 30 potential secondary transmission sites, as distant as Bondi and Cronulla beaches within the east and south of town.
Genome sequencing points to the latest virus pressure being of US origin mentioned NSW Health. A traveler arrived in Australia with a similar strain on Dec 1, but it has not been confirmed that they are patient zero.
“My anxiety is we’ve not found the direct transmission route and we cannot be certain we’ve blocked the transmission line,” mentioned NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant.
Hospitals within the affected suburbs and pop-up testing sites have been inundated with many people waiting hours to be examined.
Main public facilities within the northern beach space, such as swimming pools and playgrounds, have been closed and visitors have been banned from age care facilities.
All beaches alongside the 29km stretch of the coast have been closed till Monday.
Local media reported shoppers emptied shelves at a grocery store within the northern beaches on Friday, in a repeat of frenzied scenes earlier within the yr when the coronavirus first hit Australia.
CHRISTMAS TRAVEL CHAOS
Many individuals flocked to Sydney airport on Friday to attempt to fly out of the state, fearing hard border closures. Some travelers who left NSW have been placed in immediate hotel quarantine for 14 days when they landed in another state.
Queensland state and the Northern Territory demanded individuals who have been on the northern beaches to quarantine for 14 days. Western Australia state-imposed this on anybody from NSW.
Australia’s second-most populous state mentioned people from NSW will now require to permit to enter Victoria.
Till this week, Australia had gone more than two weeks without any local transmission, allowing most states and territories to remove nearly all social distancing curbs.
Such was the optimism that Australia on Thursday projected its economy will recover from its first recession in three decades faster than previously anticipated after containing the spread of COVID-19.
Australia’s hopes for an unchecked economic recovery, led by domestic tourism operators such as Virgin Australia and Qantas Airways, now seem unlikely.
“We have dealt with this before, we’ll deal with it again, it is important that people remain calm about these issues,” mentioned Prime Minister Scott Morrison. “There is no magic formula that makes the pandemic just go away.”
Australia has reported simply more than 28,000 coronavirus instances and 908 deaths for the reason that pandemic started and estimates most active instances within the nation are returned abroad travelers in hotel quarantine.
NSW mentioned on Friday that it had fined 13 crew from a LATAM Chile flight to Sydney US$1,000 each for allegedly failing to follow orders and self-isolate.
Because of the breach, the state will now require international flight crews to undertake mandatory quarantine in a handful of government-designated hotels.
