New Years Eve Sydney CBD revellers tov require passes

It comes after the Premier advised NSW residents to delay travel to South Australia while the state deals with a growing coronavirus cluster in Adelaide, linked to a quarantine hotel.

“Our contact tracing team are contacting people who have arrived from Adelaide from November 6 telling people to access and monitor [the SA Health] website,” Dr Chant said.

As his state recorded no new cases, South Australian Premier Steven Marshall said the six-day “pause” was warranted to contact trace the “potentially thousands of South Australians” who visited a site of concern and “may be carrying this disease”.

Under South Australia’s lockdown measures, which began on Thursday, schools and hospitality venues have been closed and only one person per household will be allowed out of the house each day.

Speaking on ABC radio on Thursday morning, Mr Marshall said a number of cases in the Adelaide cluster were asymptomatic, making the specific strain of coronavirus the city faced “quite frightening”.

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“The vast amount of people who are getting infected in this strain are showing no symptoms, so it’s quite different than anything we’ve seen before,” he said.

When announcing the six-day lockdown, South Australian Chief Medical Officer Professor Nicola Spurrier told reporters the strain of COVID-19, which has been linked to a quarantined person who arrived from Britain, appeared to have a “very, very short incubation period” and those infected showed symptoms of the virus within 24 hours of exposure.

However, some virologists said it was too early to tell any key distinguishing features of this variant of COVID-19.

The coronavirus strains circulating in Britain are similar to those elsewhere in the world, Professor Nigel McMillan, director in infectious diseases and immunology at Menzies Health Institute Queensland at Griffith University, said.

“Of course a novel strain might have arisen very recently so we await the evidence,” he added.

Associate Professor Ian Mackay, a virologist at the University of Queensland, said a 24-hour “serial interval”, a term he prefers above “incubation period”, would be unusually short and there was not enough information about the outbreak to draw firm conclusions.

“It may be that it has been difficult to accurately identify when one person was infected by another in a large family setting with many shared surfaces and air spaces providing lots of opportunities for transmission,” he said, adding a superspreading event could have also occurred.

Victoria will begin a temporary hard border closure at midnight on Thursday, with a permit system to come into effect from Saturday.

Victorian acting Chief Health Officer Allen Cheng said the fragments were found on Tuesday in wastewater samples in Portland and Benalla, near the South Australian border, that had been clear of the virus last week.

Professor Cheng said the viral fragments could either be from an active case, or a recovered case who may still be shedding the virus.

Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory all imposed travel restrictions on arrivals from South Australia earlier this week, after the first cases in the cluster were detected on Sunday.