More than two million residents in eight Sydney hotspots will now be forced to wear masks outdoors and must stay within five kilometres of their homes. With little sign that recent restrictions are reducing case numbers, Berejiklian said new curbs would be imposed on the southwestern and western areas of Sydney where the majority of COVID-19 cases are being found. 'We can only assume that things are likely to get worse before they get better given the quantity of people infectious in the community,' New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters in Sydney.īerejiklian said one more person had died from COVID-19, taking the death toll from the current outbreak to 13 and the overall national total to 921.Ī police van is parked outside an isolated residential building in Sydney's western suburb of Blacktown on Thursday, after several COVID-19 cases were reported among the residents. Australia's biggest city Sydney posted a record one-day rise in local COVID-19 cases on Thursday and warned the outbreak would get worse, as authorities sought military help to enforce a lockdown of six million people poised to enter its sixth week.Īustralia has struggled to contain an outbreak of the highly infectious delta variant in and around Sydney in recent weeks, which threatens to push the country's $2-trillion (Australian) ($1.85-trillion) economy into its second recession in as many years.ĭespite an extended lockdown of Sydney, the state capital, New South Wales recorded 239 locally acquired cases in the past 24 hours, the biggest daily rise since the pandemic began.

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