Sydney in lockdown as cases rise
State faces ‘scariest period’ since pandemic started as Delta variant takes hold
New South Wales has announced a week-long lockdown for four local government areas of Sydney, as the state’s Covid-19 outbreak records its biggest rise in cases so far.
Woollahra, Waverley, Randwick and the City of Sydney have been hit with a stay-at-home order lasting until midnight Friday.
“If you live or work in those local government areas, you need to stay at home unless absolutely necessary,” Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.
“The necessary reasons include if you can’t work from home and you have to work outside of home.
“If you can’t get educated at home and you have to get educated outside of home. If you exercise outside, although we don’t want any more groups than 10. And if you need to provide care or compassion to a relative. And fourthly, of course, if you need to buy essential goods or services.”
The rules mean anyone who has worked in one of the four local government areas in the past two weeks must also stay at home.
Berejiklian noted that applied to her as well. “I don’t live in those areas but I work there and have done so in the last fortnight, so therefore, I’m captured by that stay-at-home order,” she said.
NSW recorded its biggest rise in daily Covid-19 cases since the latest outbreak began yesterday, with 22 new locally acquired infections bringing the total to 70.
Existing restrictions announced earlier this week applying to seven local government areas – Woollahra, Waverley, Randwick, City of Sydney, Canada Bay, Inner West and Bayside – have been extended until 12.01am on Saturday, July 3.
“As previously stated, if you live or work in the City of Sydney, Waverley, Randwick, Canada Bay, Inner West, Bayside, and Woollahra local government areas, you cannot travel outside metropolitan Sydney for nonessential reasons,” NSW Health said in a statement.
“Residents across greater Sydney should also limit unnecessary activity and avoid large gatherings in coming days and comply with the current restrictions.”
Berejiklian said it was the “perhaps the scariest period” that the state had faced since the start of the pandemic due to the new Delta variant – but insisted that the tough restrictions announced on Wednesday were the “appropriate settings”.
Asked on Thursday whether NSW would consider a three-day lockdown, chief health officer Kerry Chant said that would not be “long enough”.
“Three-day lockdowns don’t work if you’ve got distributed disease,” she said.
Dr Chant said a three-day lockdown was used in situations “where you have a sudden surge of cases and you want everybody to stay in the same place, and that allows you to get any backlog of any contact tracing”.
“We are not in that situation where we are not getting to people in terms of the contact tracing,” she said.
Professor Raina MacIntyre, head of the Biosecurity Research Programme at UNSW’s Kirby Institute, wrote in an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday that Sydney was “on a knife edge of a Delta epidemic”.
“We are sitting ducks, with a largely unvaccinated or partially vaccinated population,” Professor MacIntyre said.
“Lockdowns are a last resort but, like mask mandates, are most effective when used early. The purpose is to reduce contact between people (and therefore to reduce the opportunity for growth of the epidemic).”
Professor MacIntyre argued that “waiting until the situation is out of control will require a much longer and more costly lockdown”, and claimed “multiple studies have now shown that lockdowns actually protect the economy compared with outof-control epidemics”.
“Countries like Australia and New Zealand, which used stringent measures, fared better economically than most of Europe or the US in 2020,” she wrote. “If case numbers keep rising, a short, sharp lockdown combined with school holidays might be just the circuit breaker we need to ensure this outbreak does not escalate.”