Authorities in Sydney have ordered the suspension of construction sites, banned non-essential retail purchases and threatened to fine employers who force employees to work from the office as new cases of COVID-19 continued to rise while the city has been on lockdown for three weeks.
Officials in the state of New South Wales, of which Sydney is the capital, also banned hundreds of thousands of residents in the western suburbs of the city - the worst affected area - from leaving their neighbourhoods for work, as they recorded 111 new cases in the last 24 hours compared to 97 a day earlier.
The state also recorded another death due to coronavirus, bringing to three the total number of deaths since the beginning of the year and the nationwide toll to 913 since the start of the pandemic.
«I can't remember another period when our state has faced difficulties of such magnitude,» New South Wales Premier Gladys Beretzicklian said at a televised news conference.
The city of 5 million people, Australia's largest, has been on lockdown since June 26, scheduled to end on July 30, after a driver of a vehicle transporting staff to an airport brought the virus into the community and caused an outbreak of the highly contagious variant strain, according to authorities.
Over 1,000 people and neighbouring areas have since tested positive. What is of most concern to health authorities is the number of infected people who were active in the community before they were found positive.
«We are chasing our tail in terms of outbreaks,» Kerry Chad, head of health services in New South Wales, told a news conference.
The neighbouring state of Victoria also announced a jump in daily COVID-19 cases to 19 from 6 the previous day, raising fears that a brief lockdown that was expected to end on Tuesday may be extended.
Victoria and the Sydney metropolitan area are together home to around 12 million people, which means that almost half of Australia's population is in some kind of lockdown.
Australia managed to avoid the high numbers of infections and deaths that other countries recorded in the early phases of the pandemic thanks to a series of measures such as border closures and house arrests. However, 18 months later, the federal government is being criticised for the slow progress of the vaccination campaign. Just over 10% of Australia's total population of 25 million has been fully vaccinated, according to government figures.
