Health News at Your Fingertips

Kerry Chant says increased testing numbers will give authorities confidence to relax household gathering limits.

I can’t stress enough as the premier has indicated, the higher the rates of testing, the greater assurance we have that we are not missing ongoing chains of transmission.

We may not be able to perfectly map out the transmission chains that have occurred before, we are doing our utmost to determine and detect and link all of those cases, but we may not be able to.

But what is most important at the moment is that we break all current chains of transmission. And that is the basis for the limiting the household visitor numbers.”

All residential aged care facilities across greater Sydney must exclude visitors, except those performing essential caring functions, until 11:59pm on 6 January.

Chief health officer Kerry Chant is providing more information about the cases.

She urges people in Wollongong, and the suburb of Figtree, to turn out for testing, as authorities “are concerned there have been inadvertent transmission” after a confirmed case attended church services in Wollongong.

Chant also reveals that further genome sequencing of the virus of a patient transport worker reported on 22 December shows it is identical to the virus strain from a family of three who had been transported from the airport to hotel quarantine under this worker’s care.

The sequence is also identical to that of another patient transport worker, who did not have contact with the family of three but who was a close contact with the first worker. The virus sequence for these two workers is different to that seen in the Avalon cluster.

This airport transport worker is now considered a linked case.

Here’s a breakdown of the new cases in NSW:

• Nine locally acquired cases are linked to the Avalon cluster. Eight of these cases were isolating for their full infectious period.
• Six locally acquired cases, three adults and three children, all members of the same extended family, are linked to a cluster in Sydney’s inner west whose source is still under investigation. One of these cases was first reported yesterday morning.
• Three further locally acquired cases are under investigation. Two cases, members of the same household, are from the Wollongong area and one is from northern Sydney. One of the cases from Wollongong and the northern Sydney case were first reported yesterday morning.

Gladys Berejiklian has announced a tightening of the coronavirus restrictions across greater Sydney.

Households will be limited to five visitors on New Year’s Eve. This includes the southern section of the northern beaches.

Outdoor gathering limits across greater Sydney have also been decreased, from 50 down to 30 people.

Berejiklian said:

We don’t want New Year’s Eve to be the cause of a super-spreader.

The strongest message to everybody across New South Wales no matter where you are is please limit your activity and your mobility.”

Premier Gladys Berejiklian announces that nine of the new cases are linked to the Avalon cluster and were already in isolation.

The 18 new cases were detected from 17,267 tests conducted in the 24 hours to Tuesday night.

In England, scientists have warned there could be “tens of thousands” of avoidable deaths unless the whole country is immediately put under lockdown.

The calls come in the same week that the number of patients in hospital with Covid in England surpassed the peak in the first wave, with 20,426 people in hospital with the disease on the 28 December, and numbers expected to rise further as cases climb.

On Tuesday, coronavirus cases reached a new record high, with 53,135 cases reported in the UK and 47,164 cases in England. The seven-day average rate for London as a whole to the 24 December was 807.6 per 100,000 population, twice that of the rate for England, while Thurrock, in Essex, had more than 1,300 cases per 100,000 population for the same period.

My colleague Nicola Davis has this report, which features some startling interactive graphics mapping cases around the UK.