Australia’s most populous state of New South Wales (NSW) on Saturday extended lockdown to more areas in its capital Sydney as local Covid-19 transmissions continued to increase.
From 6 p.m. on Saturday, a two-week lockdown will be imposed in Greater Sydney and some surrounding areas including Wollongong, Blue Mountains and the Central Coast, Xinhua news agency reported.
Under the new restrictions, which will last until midnight of July 9, people will only able to get out of their homes for reasons including having to work or get educated outside the home, seeking medical attention, and purchasing essential goods and services.
Community sport was not permitted and weddings will be banned from 11.59 p.m. Sunday, while funerals will be limited to one person per 4 square meters with a cap of 100 people.
Masks remain mandatory for all indoor venues except homes.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian told the media on Saturday afternoon that the authorities tightened the restrictions following health advice in a bid to curb the transmission given the high infectiousness of the Delta variant.
“When you have a contagious variant like the Delta virus, a three-day doesn’t work. If we’re going to do this, we need to do it properly,” said Berejiklian.
“If after seven days there’s a dramatic change in the trend, we’ll obviously evaluate the situation. But at this stage, the best health advice we have is that a two-week period or until midnight on Friday, July 9, is necessary, in order to make sure that we get to our target of zero community transmission, which has always been our target from the beginning of the pandemic.”
Even for those who already left Greater Sydney, so long as they have been in the zone since June 21, they have to follow the stay-at-home orders for that period for the 14 days since they left.
The state’s decision came after the state saw 82 locally acquired cases in the latest outbreak since June 16, when the index case for the Bondi cluster, a driver who transported an international flight crew was found to be infected with the Delta variant.
Berejiklian said an earlier end of the two-week lockdown if the state could realize zero local transmission is unlikely, and she expected more cases in the coming days with the increasing exposure sites and public transport routes.
“The best advice from health is that we should brace ourselves for additional cases. Because the contact tracers have done such a good job in identifying potential cases and their close contacts, just from those numbers alone and how transmissible the virus is, we know that the numbers will go up in the next few days,” she said.
Berejiklian also flagged to offer financial support for local businesses and people in need.
“So nobody should feel stressed or pressured to break any of the rules because of their financial situation. The NSW government will be there to support businesses and, of course, the Commonwealth support to households kicks in as well,” she said.
“We will provide that information and that detail in the next few days.”
With the NSW’s latest restriction, the state of Tasmania also decided to close borders to any travelers from the Greater Sydney area from 4 p.m. Saturday.