Sydneysiders will be waiting weeks for the Victorian border to reopen if NSW's southern neighbours adopt the same approach applied to them of wanting no new COVID-19 cases for 14 days - or one virus reproduction cycle.
Victoria on Tuesday was unable to give a definitive answer as to when the borders between the two states would reopen.
"This is very much going to be a day-by-day situation and assessment about what the numbers are in NSW and where the spread is," Victoria Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville said.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian has criticised other states for quickly closing their borders.Credit:James Brickwood
NSW removed all restrictions on travel to Victoria on November 23 after the southern state recorded no new cases for two weeks after bringing down the "ring of steel", the border that separated Melbourne from the state's regional areas.
NSW has only twice reached 14 days without a new local virus case during the pandemic.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian on Tuesday said there were "rumblings" of the virus still in the community and urged the public not to "assume that the outbreak is over in NSW".
"We know that there is still mopping-up to do," Ms Berejiklian said. "The remnants of the disease are still there and we can't allow any of those remnants to lead to another super-spreading event which takes us back to square one."
The longest period of time NSW has managed without any community transmission was 26 days, to December 3, when a case was reported in hotel quarantine cleaner. There was also a 21-day period from May 21 to June 10.
The next longest times spent without fresh cases were two 12-day streaks, including the one before cases were detected in a patient transport worker and two Avalon residents in December, leading to the state's latest wave of cases.
Victoria's chief health officer Brett Sutton has said the border situation with NSW was constantly under review and there was not any "really rigid criteria" that would need to be met.
There were five coronavirus cases detected in NSW in the 24 hours to 8pm on Monday, of which four were not linked to a known cluster.
Ms Berejiklian refused to comment about Victoria's "traffic light" system – which sees the "orange zone" of regional NSW able to enter the state with a permit but Greater Sydney, classified a "red zone" locked out.
"That's something for Victoria to manage, and it's not something that we'd do in NSW," she said.
She again criticised other states for implementing border restrictions against her state too quickly in December, stressing her state was pursuing zero community transmission in line with the decisions of national cabinet.
The ACT partially relaxed its border restrictions for Greater Sydney on Tuesday, however residents in 11 local government areas remain barred from entry to the territory.
Under the new rules, implemented on Tuesday afternoon, residents of Wollongong, the Central Coast and certain parts of Sydney can travel to the ACT. However, residents of the Blacktown, Burwood, Canada Bay, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland, Fairfield, Inner West, Liverpool, Parramatta and Strathfield local government areas will still not be permitted.
ACT Chief Health Officer Kerryn Coleman said mystery cases, as well as sewage testing, was taken into account when deciding which locations would still be locked out. The rules will be reviewed within a week.
People travelling from Greater Sydney remain subject to hard borders or quarantine requirements in all other states and territories, with little clarity on what thresholds must be met for policies to change.
Western Australia has said it would not reopen unless they record 28 days without a case. Previously adhering to a rule of 28 days without a mystery case, Queensland has provided no information on the metric they will use to reopen the state to Greater Sydney.
The four mystery cases included in Tuesday's numbers were the western Sydney couple reported on Monday, one of whom attended Mount Druitt Hospital, and a man and woman in their 40s from the upper part of the northern beaches also tested positive during the reporting period.
The northern beaches cases, who are household contacts, do not have any immediate links to the Avalon cluster, which numbers 151.
The fifth case in the state was a woman associated with western Sydney's Berala cluster, who had shopped at Berala BWS on December 29 and tested positive toward the end of her isolation period.
NSW Health's Dr Jeremy McAnulty raised concerns about testing numbers in the state, after there were 18,570 and 14,738 tests reported on Sunday and Monday, respectively.
The NSW-Victoria border was slammed shut. Credit:Jason Robins
"The testing numbers are way too low: we need 25,000-plus tests a day and we need to see testing in places such as the northern beaches [and] such as western Sydney where we've seen cases recently," he said.
There were 11 cases recorded in returned travellers in hotel quarantine during the reporting period, bringing the total number of cases in NSW since the start of the pandemic to 4845.
NSW has one coronavirus patient in ICU, who entered intensive care on Sunday. There are no other coronavirus patients in ICU across Australia.
Six local coronavirus cases were reported nationally on Tuesday: NSW's five and the infection in the partner of a Brisbane hotel quarantine worker, first reported on Monday night.
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Mary Ward is a health reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.
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2021-01-12 08:30:00Z
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