Australia COVID LIVE updates 415 new cases of COVID-19 in NSW Victoria has 25 new cases

Key postsHide key posts

Latest

1 of 7

Oldest

A Sydney private girls’ school will be partly closed for cleaning and contract tracing on Monday after two cases of COVID-19 were linked to its senior campus in the city’s inner west.

MLC School in Burwood was the fourth school to announce cases among members of its school community on Sunday as the outbreak of the virus’ delta variant continued to spread throughout Sydney and regional NSW.

MLC School at Burwood.Credit:Dallas Kilponen

In an email on Sunday, principal Lisa Moloney said the senior school campus would be shut on Monday. The junior school would remain open for children of essential workers and pre-kindergarten classes would continue, she said.

All staff, students and visitors who attended the school’s senior campus last week have been asked to self-isolate until they receive further advice.

Ms Moloney said flexible learning for students would continue and the school would continue to work closely with NSW Health.

“The safety and wellbeing of our students and staff are of paramount importance to us. While we recognise this will be disruptive and inconvenient for a small number of families, it is important that we follow NSW Health advice and take all necessary precautions to minimise the risk of further transmission to support our community.”

Three other Sydney schools reported people testing positive for coronavirus on Sunday.

Blacktown North Public School, Coreen School in Blacktown and Schofields Public School said members of their school community tested positive for COVID-19.

NSW Health said anyone who has been unwell or developed symptoms such as a fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, runny nose, loss of smell/taste, muscle/joint pains, diarrhoea, nausea/vomiting and/or extreme tiredness should be tested at one of the state’s COVID-19 testing clinics.

From Premier Daniel Andrews and COVID-19 response commander Jeroen Weimar to a top-ranking Victoria Police officer, authorities lined up today to chastise social distancing rule breakers. They complained there were pub crawls, house parties, play-dates and sleepovers all happening at a time when lockdown lists just five reasons for leaving home.

We asked readers to tell us what they’ve seen out on the streets and this is a selection of their responses.

These pictures of Northcote’s Peacock Hotel (which was mentioned at today’s press conference) were sent in by one reader without comment.

The Peacock Hotel in Northcote.

As a small business owner, who is following the rules. Can I please have the businesses names that have gone against health orders snd will help keep us in lockdown for longer due to there selfish behaviour. I would love to begin a civil case to sue them fir preventing my business to open sooner due to their selfish behaviour. Grow up. Name and shame them I want to make sure I don’t go to those businesses once we open up. Margaret

Went for my 2 hour solo bike ride this morning. Rode past several packed coffee-shop precincts and crowded playgrounds in East Kew and Hawthorn where there were few masks ’cos, y’know, coffee, and large groups of people mingling with little attention to social distancing. Playgrounds were closed for months last year. Mike

10 mask-less teenagers sitting together shoulder to shoulder on Queens Parade in North Fitzroy. Hugging, laughing and putting the rest of Melbourne at risk. Unbelievably upsetting! Anonymous

It’s everywhere where there is a park or a beach. Maskless people pretending to be drinking to avoid mask requirements, carrying empty drink containers. No enforcement anywhere in sight. Antoine

Edinburgh Gardens in Fitzroy North is full of people drinking alcohol, out for much longer than two hours, sitting in large groups, not wearing masks and definitely not exercising; not to mention the public urinating that occurs. Many local cafe’s and restaurants are selling take away alcohol too which just adds to the drunkenness and stupidity. This happened last year and is a disgrace. The city of yarra don’t do anything to help either and take no responsibility even though they allow drinking of alcohol in public places. Anonymous

Read all the responses here.

Victoria’s list of exposure sites exceeded 500 on Sunday as beloved northern suburbs business A1 Bakery closed after a positive case visited the venue on Saturday morning.

The Sydney Road Lebanese bakery has been deemed a tier-2 exposure site by the Victorian Health Department and was closed immediately, the bakery announced on Instagram on Sunday afternoon.

A1 Bakery, in Brunswick, announced their closure on Sunday on their account @a1bakery.Credit:Instagram

“All the staff that were present during the exposure time have been advised and will be tested and isolating until they receive their results. If you were at our store during the exposure time, please do the same,” store management said in a statement.

“The store will remain closed to undertake a deep clean and until it is cleared by the DHHS for reopening.

“We appreciate your understanding as we take the appropriate steps.”

The 500th addition, the 181 Fitzroy Street Apartment Complex in St Kilda, was listed as a tier-1 site on Sunday afternoon.

A school in Sydney’s west will be closed for cleaning and contact tracing on Monday after a member of the school community tested positive to COVID-19.

The NSW Department of Education said close contacts of the case at Blacktown North Public School had been notified and asked to self-isolate.

The department requested all staff and students self-isolate until they received further advice. It said the Blacktown North Out of School Hour Care would not be operating during this time.

Two other Sydney schools reported people testing positive for coronavirus today. Coreen school in Blacktown and Schofields public school both said members of their school community tested positive for COVID-19.

NSW Health said anyone who has been unwell or developed symptoms such as a fever, cough, sore throat, shortness of breath, runny nose, loss of smell/taste, muscle/joint pains, diarrhoea, nausea/vomiting and/or extreme tiredness should be tested at one of the state’s COVID-19 testing clinics.

Victorian authorities are preparing pop-up testing and vaccine sites in St Kilda East after two new cases emerged in the area this weekend.

A mother and her son who live in the same household were announced as part of Sunday’s 25 cases. They are members of the tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community.

Health officials have been in meetings with local community leaders since Saturday. Community leaders were told the two new cases may have attended a large gathering in recent days, according to multiple local sources speaking confidentially to detail the early stages of the investigations.

There have been reports of minyans - prayer gatherings with a minimum of 10 people - being held during Victoria’s lockdown. However, the gathering being investigated as an exposure site was not a prayer meeting.

The Rabbinical Council of Victoria has called on community members to follow public health rules and the Jewish Community Council of Victorian condemned the prayer gatherings.

During last year’s second wave police raided multiple illegal prayer meetings held by members of Melbourne’s orthodox community.

Authorities are focussed on ensuring as many members of the community as possible come forward for testing.

Police say they were aware of a party planned to be held on the Mornington Peninsula that would have seen 1000 Victorians congregate.

Victoria Police Acting Superintendent Greg Hinton said authorities were actively patrolling the area after planners had hired a DJ and invited thousands to attend the gathering.

“We had a street party last night in the Mornington Peninsula set up for 1000. It was a house party actually with a DJ and stage,” he said.

“We were actively patrolling that area, discouraging people to come.

“It is difficult for officers to monitor every situation where people are picking up takeaways ... because restaurants and things are everywhere, people are gathering … with the warm weather.”

People congregate outside the Peacock Inn, on High Street in Northcote, on Sunday.

The comments came after roughly 200 Victorians gathered on Sunday afternoon for an informal party on High Street, in Northcote, when a DJ set up outside the Peacock Inn.

People were seen lining up on Sunday for takeaway drinks at Brogan’s Way in Richmond.

People line up for takeaway drinks at Brogan’s Way takeaway in Richmond on Sunday.

Several restaurants and pubs in the area were selling takeaway alcohol to remain in compliance with the directions issued by Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton

But Acting Superintendent Hinton said it was the responsibility of Victorians to adhere to the directions issued by the CHO, and that he expected people to look at the substance of their actions to decide whether they were in breach.

“The community has to be responsible for their own actions in particular situations where they genuinely know that they are breaking a CHO direction,” he said.

Acting Superintendent Greg Hinton, from Victoria Police, is providing a coronavirus update on COVID-19 restrictions breaches.

Unfortunately, due to some technical issues, we missed the start of Acting Superintendent Hinton’s briefing, but we will bring you a summary of the press conference soon.

One of Victoria’s leading epidemiologists has backed the decision to send more than half of the million Pfizer vaccine doses obtained from Poland to the worst affected areas of Sydney’s outbreak.

Catherine Bennett, Chair of Epidemiology at Deakin University, says it is “absolutely” the right approach to get the majority of the jabs to the areas of greatest need, saying the whole country should be supporting NSW in trying to control its outbreak.

“We can’t contain this to NSW, just because of the sheer number of infections, it gets harder and harder to manage and that’s why it’s pushing out to regional NSW and that’s why the whole country has to focus on trying to support NSW however we can,” Professor Bennett told The Age.

Professor Bennett said Victoria was approaching make or break point in managing its current COVID crisis with authorities still “mapping the outbreak”.

“Every day we’re getting cases popping up that tell us we’ve got wider spread than we realised,”

“We don’t know how far the virus has got out into the community and without being alarmist, that’s what happened in Sydney. They found the chains of transmission out into western Sydney only after they’d been there for a few weeks and then found how widespread it was.”

“It was actually the same point in time, three weeks after the first major exposure sites at Bondi Junction .

“In Victoria, it’s been three weeks since our outbreak started, the current clusters...and it’s that three week point which is where you start to see if you’ve missed something.”

Melbourne’s lockdown, and the restrictions that were in place prior to its imposition, had improved the chances for health authorities to contain the current outbreak, Professor Bennett said.

But with the prospects of Melbourne’s lockdown ending this week looking more and more uncertain, the professor said there was “a lot of work to do” before Victorian health authorities would be able to recommend the city could open up.

“We had been in lockdown or we had those nine or 10 days of quite serious restrictions. That works in our favour and I think that’s why we’re not like Sydney by this stage, we’re seeing 20 cases a day not 80 or 100 cases.”

“But the next week is really critical, this week will tell us if we’re going to follow that rise...or whether we can pull this back because the numbers are very manageable.

“But looking at what happened in Sydney, you’d have to think we’ve got a lot of work to do before the Health Department can be confident that they’ve got this fully scoped.”

Opposition leader Michael O’Brien has slammed Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews as “arrogant” for not laying out a plan to get children back to school.

When Andrews was asked on Sunday about how he planned to keep schools open, he said thousands of students, and their parents, moving around in the community would spread the virus. Melbourne’s latest outbreak was seeded through Al-Taqwa College in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien. Credit:Justin McManus

“I know that having kids at home is not fun, particularly if you’re working from home as well and all of that, it’s very stressful, very challenging,” Mr Andrews said.

“But we’ll take care of every child, every student ... the tutor program we put in place - there are more than 5000 of these tutors working with kids one on one and in small groups to catch everyone up and make sure that everybody is exactly where they would have been if this global event hadn’t happened. They’re going a great job, and if they have to work longer, then of course they will be.”

He dismissed the pposition’s calls for rapid antigen testing in schools, saying they had not yet been approved by the Therapeutic and Goods Administration and described it as a “political stunt”.

However, Mr O’Brien said leading epidemiologists Tony Blakely, Sharon Lewin and Mary-Louise McLaws have all been calling on governments to begin using rapid antigen tests, as part of a suite of measures, to keep COVID-19 out of the community.

“The premier needs to stop being arrogant,” Mr O’Brien said.

“If he wants to dismiss my plan, that’s one thing, but he doesn’t have a plan to reopen schools, he doesn’t have a plan to get our major events back, he doesn’t have a plan to get us out of lockdown.

“We’re at least putting up ideas that are supported by leading public health experts. And frankly, it’s about time the Premier stopped being arrogant, stopped dismissing every idea that he didn’t come up with, and started listening and started acting.”

It’s been a busy day with NSW reporting 415 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 and four deaths. Victoria recorded 25 new cases, there were two more local cases in the ACT while Queensland had no new local infections.

One million extra doses of the Pfizer vaccine will start landing in Australia tonight from Poland. The first 530,000 shots will be made available to 20 to 39-year-olds in Sydney suburbs with the highest infection rates.

People enjoying the weather at Balmoral beach on Sunday. Credit:James Alcock

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said today that it’s “not possible to eliminate” the Delta strain of COVID-19 completely and we “have to learn to live with it”.

NSW Police will launch Operation Stay At Home from midnight tonight with a “significant boost” to public health order enforcement across the state with 1400 highway patrol officers dedicated to COVID-19 compliance operations on the state’s roads. There will also be 500 Australian Defence Force troops, in addition to the 300 already deployed, to assist with compliance checks and patrols.

The Victorian premier has not ruled out an extension of the lockdown, saying mystery cases and rising case numbers are becoming “concerning” after he lambasted a purported ‘sip and stroll’ event on Saturday across the suburb of Richmond in Melbourne’s inner east.

Rapid antigen testing will be trialled in 50 aged care facilities in Sydney, Health minister Greg Hunt said.

Latest

1 of 7

Oldest

Share this post