New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian has warned people not to travel to hotspots of Covid-19 infections in Victoria, and also reconsider travel to Melbourne unless it’s absolutely essential.
With Victoria battling a new outbreak of infections and an uptick in community transmission, the NSW premier told reporters on Monday she would not close the border with Victoria, but she said the spike in Melbourne was a wake-up call, because it was entirely possible the same thing could happen in Sydney.
“The border between NSW and Victoria will continue to stay open. However, as is consistent with the health advice from Victoria, and also from NSW, nobody from NSW should be travelling to those hotspots at this present time,” Berejiklian said.
“People should consider whether they should be travelling to Melbourne at this point in time whilst community transmission is where it is.”
The Victorian hotspots have been identified as Hume, Casey, Brimbank, Moreland, Cardinia and Darebin. After recording another 19 cases on Sunday, taking to 160 the number of new cases in the state over the past week, Victoria has recorded 16 new cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours.
The Andrews government announced on Sunday it would extend its state of emergency for at least four more weeks and ramp up enforcement of lockdown rules. South Australia is reconsidering its decision to reopen its border.
Australia’s chief medical officer Brendan Murphy was asked on Monday whether or not the Victorian outbreak constituted a second wave of infections. He said there was “no official definition”.
“It’s a concept where the outbreak is such that you don’t think the public health measures can easily control it in the short term,” Murphy said. He said “at the moment, I have great confidence in the Victorian response”.
Asked why the number of infections had increased in Victoria, but so far, not elsewhere, Murphy said “there is a lot of luck in this”.
“Both Victoria and NSW had by far the largest number of initial cases from return travellers and both NSW and Victoria have been our concerns in terms of community transmission,” he said.
“NSW has, very fortunately, been in a much stronger position in recent weeks. It is not really possible to say why they have managed to bring community transmission under better control than Victoria – there could be a lot of reasons for that.”
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, spoke to the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, over the weekend, and he said on Monday governments had always warned the easing of public health restrictions was likely to trigger new outbreaks of the coronavirus.
“There will be setbacks from time to time but we’ve built up the systems to deal with the setbacks,” he said. Morrison said governments had always countenanced dealing with outbreaks by localised containment strategies, or “rings of containment”.
The prime minister said it was understandable that the Andrews government would pause the easing of restrictions to help manage the outbreak, but he said governments needed to push on with opening the economy back up.
“We can’t just shut everything up forever,” Morrison told reporters in Sydney. “The economic impacts of that are devastating.
“There will be outbreaks. There will be cases. What matters is that we’ve built the protections to deal with them, and that’s what I want Australians to have confidence in – there will be cases, but the work has been done to build up our defences.”
Morrison said it was important for people in the community to understand that reopening the economy did not mean the virus had gone away. “Covid hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s still out there, and it can still take hold, so we can’t be complacent about it, and we certainly aren’t as governments all around the country.”
Berejiklian said as well as avoiding the hotspots, people needed to stay home if they were unwell.
“Do not leave the house if you have the mildest symptoms, except to get tested, and then stay home until you get the result and you’re cleared.
“This is so important. We have to live with this pandemic. We don’t know how long it’s going to last. It could be a year, it could be two years, it could be less than that, we don’t know.
“But what we do know is that we need to live with it, and it means that we need to make sure that people are working and have a good quality of life, that our economy is moving forward, and that’s why we have to deal with these spikes as best we can.”
The Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, meanwhile told the Australian National University the pandemic would disrupt both the domestic and global economy, and governments and centrals banks needed to “throw everything” at the problem.
“We do face a world where there’ll be a shadow from the virus for quite a few years,” Lowe said. “People will be more risk-averse, they won’t want to borrow. In Australia we’re going to have lower population dynamics.”
Lowe said given the substantial economic shock associated with the pandemic, interest rates would likely stay at current lows for some time.
