Australian authorities extended lockdown in Sydney on Wednesday by at least 14 days, after three weeks of restrictions failed to quell the biggest outbreak of COVID-19 there this year.
New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian asserted that restrictions would need to remain in place until at least July 30 after reporting 97 new locally transmitted cases, a slight increase from a day earlier.
“It always hurts to say this, but we need to extend the lockdown at least a further two weeks,”Berejiklian said. “We want to get out of this lockdown as soon as we can and that is why we have the settings in place that we have.”
“We appreciate and understand the stress this means for inpiduals, for families and, of course, for businesses. But what would be far worse is being in a situation where you have to live in and out of lockdown until that period of time when we have the vaccine available to us,” she told reporters.
In the same page, the state premier has repeatedly mentioned that these measures will be lifted only when the number of newly reported cases, circulated in the community while infectious, were close to zero.
Notably, the shutdown has now been extended on two occasions as the restrictions failed to curb daily case numbers. Total infections since the first was initially detected in the city’s eastern suburbs in mid-June now stand at just under 900. The country has reported two deaths which were the first for this year.
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