People have been moving around the northern beaches and inner west more than those in Fairfield for retail and recreational purposes, although Sydney’s southwest has been travelling more for work since the Bondi cluster was discovered.
As movement across the city declined steeply in late June as Sydney’s latest lockdown was enforced, Google data shows retail and recreation travel had dropped 38 per cent by last Friday in the northern beaches and inner west, compared to 48 per cent in Fairfield.
Movement for the same purpose in Campbelltown declined by just 18 per cent and Penrith 25 per cent, while Sydney’s CBD recorded the biggest drop at 78 per cent, followed by North Sydney at 68 per cent.
Fairfield has the most places visited by infected people this month with 14 venues, Wetherill Park has 12, Burwood and Roselands each have 10 places listed and Bondi Junction has six.
Despite stay-at-home orders and pleas from the Premier and NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant asking people not to “go out and about shopping” on Friday, July 2, people unknowingly infected with the virus continued to visit stores a week later.
On Saturday, July 10 a COVID-positive person visited 99 Bikes at Bondi Junction, another went to Big W and Kmart in Bankstown on Friday (July 9) and another went to Harvey Norman, JB HiFi and Kmart at Broadway shopping centre.
Sydney’s China town early this week.Credit:Rhett Wyman
There are now 300 locations where confirmed COVID-19 cases have visited this month, spread across 108 suburbs.
Senior transport management lecturer at Sydney University Geoffrey Clifton said the number of essential workers, including tradespeople, nurses and teachers in southwest Sydney meant that there would always be more movement in the region, regardless of lockdowns.
“No matter how hard you lockdown Sydney, we’re going to need essential workers and many of them live in those parts of Sydney,” Dr Clifton said.
“It’s one of the balancing acts that all governments are facing at the moment. We could go down the Victorian path of putting in place a huge lockdown, but even there they needed exemptions for essential workers.”
New testing requirements were imposed on Tuesday morning for people living in Fairfield after 64 of the 89 new cases were found to reside within the South West Sydney Local Health District. Fifteen new cases were recorded in the South Eastern Sydney district.
People living in the Fairfield local government area who work outside the council area must get a COVID-19 test every three days to demonstrate they are negative, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced.
Ms Berejiklian pleaded with the community to limit their travel as the state grapples with the highly transmissible COVID-19 Delta variant.
“This variant of the virus has a life of its own; it is more contagious, it moves around in different ways than we have ever seen before,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“Unfortunately we see what we call asymptomatic people who don’t have symptoms leaving the house, going out of the local area to work and unfortunately sending the virus to other parts of greater Sydney...and that’s what we need to stop.”
Patronage on Sydney’s public transport was down to about 15 per cent of pre-pandemic levels on Monday.
Public transport patronage had returned to about 60 percent of pre-COVID levels prior to the latest outbreak, with 1.4 million trips recorded on the NSW network on Monday June 7.
Road traffic has declined by about 30 per cent in just over a month, with 71 million car movements recorded on Monday, compared to 108 million movements on June 7, which was higher than pre-pandemic levels.
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Tom Rabe is Transport Reporter with The Sydney Morning Herald.
Nigel Gladstone is an investigative journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald.
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2021-07-13 05:48:43Z
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