MELBOURNE (Reuters) – Australia’s New South Wales reported 30 new coronavirus cases on Sunday, authorities said, as Sydney and its surroundings woke up to the first day of a two-week lockdown imposed to quell an outbreak of the highly contagious Delta variant.
Sunday numbers, collected before 8 p.m. on Saturday, take the number of infections linked to the Bondi outbreak to 110 and two other cases remain investigation. Some 52,000 tests were conducted.
“Given how contagious this strain of the virus is, we do anticipate that in the next few days, case numbers are likely to increase beyond what we have seen today because we are seeing that people in isolation, unfortunately, would have already transmitted to all their house contacts,” state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told a news briefing.
On Saturday, several million of people in Sydney and the regions of Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong, which surround Australia’s largest city, were ordered into a lockdown.
Neighbouring Queensland reported on Sunday two locally acquired COVID-19 cases, with authorities saying both infections were of the Alpha variant, first detected in the United Kingdom in September of 2020.
(Reporting by John Mair and Lidia Kelly; Editing by William Mallard)
