Australia news live: NSW records 18 new Covid cases as premier announces New Year’s Eve restrictions for Sydney | Australia news

NSW Health has released a lit of new venues that have been visited by confirmed cases of Covid-19. This includes a Santa Claus Photo Booth at Westfield Burwood Shopping Centre.

Their statement is below.

Advice for people who attended two Greek Orthodox churches in Wollongong has been updated. This replaces previous advice that anyone who attended either church should get tested immediately and self-isolate until they receive further advice from NSW Health.

New advice for St Nektarios Greek Orthodox Church, 39 Atchison Street, Wollongong, is that anyone who attended on Sunday, 27 December between 9am and 10.15am is a close contact and must get tested and isolate for 14 days regardless of the result.

New advice for the Holy Cross Greek Orthodox Church, 18 Stewart Street, Wollongong, is that anyone who attended on Sunday, 27 December between 10.30am and 11am is a casual contact who must get tested and isolate until a negative result is received.

Anyone who visited any of the following venues at the listed times is considered a casual contact who must get tested immediately and isolate until a negative result is received:

• Burwood: Santa Claus Photo Booth, Westfield Burwood Shopping Centre, 100 Burwood Road, Tuesday 22 December, 11:15am-11:45am
• Punchbowl: Officeworks, 1618 Canterbury Road, Monday 21 December, 8.30pm-9pm
• Shellharbour: Coffee Club – Stockland Shellharbour, 211 Lake Entrance Road, Sunday 27 December, 11am-12pm

Anyone who visited any of the following venues at the listed times should monitor for symptoms and get tested immediately and isolate if they appear:

• Figtree: Coles – Figtree Grove Shopping Centre, 19 Princes Highway, Monday 28 December, 4.45pm-5.20pm
• Greenacre: Bunnings Greenacre, Corner of Roberts Road and Amarina Avenue, Saturday 26 December, 12.30pm-1pm
• Shellharbour: Myer – Stockland Shellharbour, 211 Lake Entrance Road, Sunday 27 December, 12pm-12.40pm

The ABC’s Dr Norman Swan, who hosts the popular coronacast podcast, says Sydney should lock down now for two weeks, mandate masks, and hold the third Test without spectators.

Speaking on the ABC, he says:

If you take the cumulative case numbers, there are around about 150 to date, and we know from research done at the Kirby Institute in Sydney that we under-diagnose by at least a factor of three. If you go by the Australian National University figures we under-diagnose by a factor of seven. Kirby Institute’s probably more accurate, so there are 450 to 500 cases out there in New South Wales not 150.

Swan says that greater Sydney should mandate mask-use and go into a two-week lockdown, and limit movement between greater Sydney and the regions.

Effectively doing what Victoria did but doing it probably a bit earlier than Victoria did to prevent a serious second wave. And the worst that can happen here is that nothing happens, but the risk here is that it’s spreading through greater metropolitan Sydney, greater Sydney, and you don’t know where it is and there are clusters you may not have identified.

On the Sydney Test, he says:

In the current environment it really is not good public health to continue with the Sydney Test. Yes, it’s outdoors but there are choke points. People are travelling by train and bus to get there. You’ve got to go through narrow turnstiles and we’re not mandating masks in that situation. So I think that the Sydney Test should go ahead but without spectators.

Queensland Health says the new cases in Sydney are “concerning” and “we will be monitoring the situation over coming days”.

But the fourth Test, scheduled to start in Brisbane on 15 January, is still set to go ahead – only a week after the Sydney Test starts on 7 January.

Earlier, we reported that a spokesman for the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk also said the Test would start, as long as all players stuck to their Covid bubbles.

Queensland Health just told Guardian Australia:

Queensland Health is continuing to work closely with Cricket Australia on plans to hold the fourth Test in Brisbane.

Both teams and their officials would need to follow the same arrangements Queensland has put in place for other sporting codes like the NRL and AFL.

When teams travel from declared hotspots, they would immediately go into quarantine hotels and leave only to train or play matches.

Broadcasting staff essential to televising the match must follow similar rules.

Upon completion of the Test, players must either depart immediately or, if they wished to remain in Queensland, serve the remainder of their 14 days in hotel quarantine if an international player or in home quarantine if they normally reside in Brisbane.

Requirements for crowds will be managed in accordance with the stadium’s Covid Safe Site Specific Plan. Any changes will be determined closer to the Test, when the Covid-19 risk is clearer.

And here is a handy guide to the New Year’s Eve rules in Victoria, also courtesy of AAP:

• Up to 30 visitors to your home a day with no limit on the number of households they’re from.
• Up to 200 people meeting outdoors in public.
• Practice physical distancing, and wear a mask if you can’t maintain 1.5 metres from people you don’t live with.
• Masks are mandatory on public transport and ride share services.
• Only share happy new year hugs and kisses with immediate family and those you live with.

Victoria is still a “long way” from reopening its border with NSW after the state’s northern neighbour recorded 18 cases of community transmission.

Half of the new cases belong to the Sydney northern beaches cluster, while a second cluster has emerged in the city’s inner west, along with cases in Wollongong, south of Sydney.

According to AAP, Victoria’s police minister, Lisa Neville, said decisions about the border were being made on a daily basis, but based on health advice no one is ready to contemplate changes.

We’re still a long way from that border being open.

Neville wouldn’t rule out extending the red zone, with concern for cases outside the northern beaches.

“I know we were concerned about the Wollongong spread and the case there, and that occurred I think through churches, so we’ll continue to monitor this and if we need we’ll extend that red zone,” she said.

Victoria on Wednesday marked 61 days without a local transmission of coronavirus and just one case of a returned traveller in her 20s, who is in hotel quarantine.

There are only eight active cases, all in hotel quarantine or self-isolation, including seven international travellers and a teenager girl at home after contracting the virus in NSW.

Neville acknowledged the effect the border restrictions had on local communities, but said people were largely supportive.

“We all do want to say goodbye to this year, we all do hope that 2021 is a better year that we’ve got ahead, but we don’t have a vaccine,” she said.

“It has been a very hard year and we have done an incredible thing as Victorians – let’s not risk it as we celebrate the end of 2020.”

Queensland authorities are closely monitoring the quarantined passengers who flew into Brisbane with Australia’s first known case of the South African coronavirus variant.

The woman arrived carrying the strain, which is thought to be a more contagious form of Covid-19, on 22 December, AAP reports.

The state’s chief health officer, Jeannette Young, described the variant as “very concerning” and said the patient was immediately placed into hotel quarantine.

“Genome sequencing has come back to show she has this new variant that has been picked up in South Africa that is thought to be more contagious,” Young said.

The woman was transferred via ambulance to the Sunshine Coast University hospital.

The Queensland health minister, Yvette D’Ath, said while other jurisdictions had detected a UK variant of the virus, this was the first time the South African strain had been confirmed in Australia.

“We are absolutely confident all proper measures were taken at the hotel and in the transfer, and of course at the hospital in relation to this positive case,” she said.

Young said the case posed “very low risk” to the community.

Even so, all other passengers onboard the woman’s flight were in quarantine and being carefully monitored.

Question: Why is the TGA delaying approval?

Kelly:

Firstly, the TGA is not delaying anything. Emergency approvals have been put forward by other regulators. Just to be clear, emergency approval is very different from a regular standard full approval. All of those emergency approvals that have happened overseas come with very strict guidelines about who can be given it, what sort of wrap-around in terms of safety and so forth and monitoring will happen. So it is a very different process. We don’t have that process in Australia.

In terms of when that approval will come forward, once we have all the information that we need to make that approval from the companies that are making these vaccines available, that will be very quickly but thoroughly looked at, and these are many, many pages of tens of thousands of pages of documents. So we have our team on standby right now, as soon as that arrives, we will be looking at it. And that will be an independent regulator’s approval process, as is the case with every vaccine and every new medicine in Australia. As soon as that is done, that’s not quite the end of the story. There needs to be batch testing and so forth for quality, and then the final distribution will happen very rapidly after that. So the rate-limiting step, really, is getting the information from the companies themselves.

And that’s the end of the press conference.

Kelly is asked about the Sydney Cricket Ground hosting the third Test between Australia and India.

Kelly, who admits he is a cricket tragic, says that NSW authorities stressed that outdoor entertainment in a seated venue is much safer than indoor gatherings.

I agree with that. I must say that – and I know that there are very good Covid-safe plans that have been reinforced with NSW Health and the SCG, as well, I’m sure Cricket Australia … that will be able to be looked at in coming days. There are crowd restrictions, for example, masks will be made available etc.

However, Kelly adds that he wouldn’t be taking his elderly family members to the cricket.

The other thing I would say is that the start date is 7 January and nine days is very long in Covid time. So let’s see what happens in Sydney in the next week.

Pressed on whether he is OK with the cricket going ahead, he says it’s a decision for the NSW government.

Kelly says that while authorities are looking closely at the idea of an immunity passport, it’s not on the cards for now.

The concept is that people who have been vaccinated could avoid hotel quarantine when coming to Australia.

He says:

There is no change. If people have been vaccinated or not, they will be having 14 days quarantine for the time being. And we should remember that although a vaccine has been rolled out in a number of countries, I think tomorrow will be the first person in the UK will be getting their second dose of vaccine, and we know that the Pfizer vaccine, even though it is very effective, that maximum effectiveness doesn’t kick in until a week after the second vaccine, which is essentially a month after the first vaccine.

So we have some time to consider these matters, but for the moment, vaccination will not be an alternative to 14-day quarantine, and those decision also have to be thought through carefully over the coming months as to how that will be handled.

Kelly is asked about antigen, or rapid, tests. He notes that there was a massive ramp-up of testing numbers in NSW in the lead-up to Christmas and that turnaround times had still held up.

So we’re relying on that gold standard for now. The antigen tests will have a role, definitely, but at the moment it is the PCR testing.

Kelly is further addressing the new variant that has been picked up overseas in the UK. He notes there are, in fact, “many variants” of the virus.

The UK variant is more transmissible, but not does not cause more severe illness.

The particular variant out of the UK – we are getting more information about that. Public Health England provided interim results of their examination of that issue in the UK overnight. It confirms what we have said here before is that this variant is not more severe, doesn’t cause more severe illness. There is no increase in hospitalisation or increase in 28-day mortality. So they are positive signs. It does appear that it is more transmissible, but not majorly so.