Distancing measures in Sydney

SYDNEY: Australian officials reinstated social distancing measures across greater Sydney yesterday, as they scrambled to find missing transmission links in a Covid19 case connected to an Indian variant of the virus.

With many people expected to gather over the weekend for Mother’s Day celebrations, the NSW state government restricted household gatherings to 20 guests and limited aged care facility visitors to two people per resident.

Masks will be mandatory on public transport and at indoor venues. All the restrictions, which cover about 5.3 million people in the country’s biggest metropolitan area, took effect at 5pm (local time) and are scheduled to last until Monday morning.

‘‘We believe this is a proportionate response to the risk we have ahead of us,’’ NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.

The measures, which also cover Sydney’s neighbouring regions of Wollongong, the Central Coast and Blue Mountains, follow the detection of Covid19 in a 50yearold man, who passed the infection to his wife.

The case, the first local transmission in NSW in more than a month, baffled health officials, given the man had no known links to highrisk jobs or people.

Testing has determined the man was infected with a variant first detected in India and genomic sequencing had linked the case to a returned traveller from the United States, NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said yesterday, but there was no clear transmission path between the two people.

Authorities also asked thousands of residents in the city’s inner west to seek testing for any mild flu symptoms after fragments of coronavirus were detected in the sewerage network used by several suburbs.

A Tasmanian man is in hospital after developing blood clots a week after getting the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine.

Australia’s medical regulator has found the 70yearold’s case was probably linked to the vaccine.

A Queensland man is also being treated in intensive care for blood clots which are believed to be directly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

That brings to 11 cases the Therapeutic Goods Administration has linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia.

India reported a record 412,262 new Covid19 cases in a day yesterday and a record 3980 daily death toll, as a second wave of infections spreads from cities into the vast countryside.

Covid19 infections have surged past 21 million, and the death toll is 230,168, Indian health ministry data shows.

Soldiers and police in Fiji have surrounded and locked down a major hospital.

Health authorities say they are quarantining 400 patients, doctors, nurses and other staff within the compound until they can determine who had contact with a coronavirus patient who died there.

The 53yearold patient at Lautoka Hospital was only the third person to die from the virus in Fiji, which has about one million people.

But the nation’s leaders are worried the latest outbreak is spreading, especially after two doctors at the hospital tested positive for the virus.

A health official said the hospital was closed and all medical services were being diverted to other facilities. — Reuters/AAP/ AP