Sydney on Thursday August 5 recorded a record number of new cases of Covid-19 and five deaths from the coronavirus, leading authorities to extend containment of Australia's largest city to surrounding areas.
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Six weeks after the lockdown for Sydney's five million residents took effect, the number of new infections in the state of New South Wales reached 262 on Thursday, the highest figure since the start of the pandemic .
Health authorities said that almost all of the new cases had been identified in Sydney but contaminations were recorded in other districts, leading the Prime Minister of the State, Gladys Berejiklian, to geographically extend the containment measures.
20% of Australians fully vaccinated
Five people have tested positive in Newcastle - a city of 320,000 inhabitants located on the coast north of Sydney - prompting authorities to close schools and order confinement of at least a week.
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Five people between the ages of 60 and 80 have died in Sydney in the past 24 hours.
None of them were fully vaccinated.
“
I cannot stress
enough
how important it is for everyone, regardless of age, to be vaccinated,
” said Gladys Berejiklian.
Barely 20% of Australians have received two doses of the vaccine, due to supply problems and great mistrust among the population.
Australia has so far been relatively spared from the pandemic.
But since the end of June, the immense island-continent has struggled to curb the spread of the Delta variant, which is much more contagious.
The Sydney outbreak presumably started from an unvaccinated driver who took care of airline crews and who tested positive in mid-June. Since then, New South Wales has recorded 4,319 locally acquired cases and half of the country's 25 million people have been subjected to containment measures or severe restrictions.