NSW's top health official says there would be no point in imposing a snap COVID-19 lockdown on the state, despite 11 new infections being recorded today.
Key points:
- NSW Health has not ruled out a snap lockdown decision
- Kerry Chant said that "three days is not long enough" for a lockdown
- The Delta strain of the virus is still a cause for concern for authorities
Chief health officer Kerry Chant said a three-day lockdown — like those seen in some other capital cities dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks — wouldn't work in Sydney.
She said such a short lockdown would not protect the community as the virus was already spreading.
"Three-day lockdowns don't work if you've got distributed disease," Dr Chant said.
"Three days is not long enough."
Dr Chant said other states had used snap lockdowns to give their contact tracing teams more time to research infection chains during an outbreak.
ABC News: Tim Swanston
)However, she said authorities in NSW were on top of the latest clusters, for now.
"We are not in that situation where we are not getting to people in terms of the contact tracing," Dr Chant said.
Greater Sydney has managed to avoid a lockdown for more than 12 months, with the exception of the northern beaches, which was isolated over Christmas due to a large COVID-19 cluster.
Other states have been quicker to call lockdowns.
Melbourne has endured four while Brisbane and Perth have both seen snap lockdowns multiple times due to locally-acquired COVID-19 cases.
Dr Chant said she wouldn't rule out calling a lockdown in the days and weeks ahead if the situation in NSW deteriorated.
"It is a really important element and we may well be in that situation," she said.
Abrar Chughtai, an epidemiologist and expert in infectious diseases from the University of New South Wales, said there were three key indicators authorities would be looking at before introducing stay at home orders. Those indicators are the vaccination status, the kind of cases and the virus variant.
"Mainly we need vaccination but at this time, when less than 10 per cent of the Australian population are fully vaccinated, this means we have to rely on other measures like lockdowns, distancing and mask use," he said.
"As we know the Delta variant is really, really, really nasty so if cases of transmission are high, you need a hard lockdown."
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)For now, Dr Chant said the biggest worry for NSW health authorities was not knowing just how fast and how widely the virus is spreading.
"There are chains of transmission that we are not aware of," she said.
"We know that because we have some unlinked cases so there must be some missing links there," she said.
The other big worry, she said, was the ease with which the Delta strain was being passed on.
"We have seen transmission in settings, and I will not overplay this, but in settings [where] transmissions occur more frequently than we would have seen before," she said.
The Delta strain at the centre of Sydney's outbreak was first identified in India, but has since spread around the world.
She said it meant more work for contact tracers.
"Rather than saying who was in the particular shop it's who you passed by in the corridors getting to that shop or the elevators," Dr Chant said.
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2021-06-24 06:54:54Z
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