SYDNEY (AP) – An outbreak of 30 additional 70 cases has been reported in the last 24 hours in Sydney’s North Beach suburb, and officials say they will never be able to trace the source.
While the numbers are rising, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berezclian said Sunday that there is no evidence of large-scale seed planting outside the North Coast community. However a new list of cases shows that the virus spread to large Sydney and other parts of the state.
The government has imposed a lockdown in the area till Wednesday. Residents will only be allowed to leave their home for five basic reasons, be it medical care, exercise, grocery store, work or compassionate care.
The state’s chief health officer, Carrie Chant, said contact tracers were yet to find the patient, but a detailed investigation was under way.
Elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region:
– South Korea has reported more than a thousand new coronavirus cases for the fifth day in a row, enforcing the most difficult distance rules to put pressure on officials to do more damage to the economy. The Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency says it has received 1,097 additional cases in the past 24 hours, the daily figure since the outbreak began. Which puts the national case burden at 49,665, including 674 deaths. About 70% of new cases come from the densely populated Seoul metropolitan area, which is at the heart of the viral resurgence. The pace of spread has already met the government’s conditions for raising the rules of social distance to their highest level. But officials have been reluctant to move forward given the concerns of the economy. The new measure would ban gatherings of more than 10 people and shut down thousands of unnecessary businesses.
– Two new local infections were reported in Thailand on Sunday, a day after more than 500 cases were identified south of Bangkok, the country most in control of the epidemic. On Saturday, 8,548 cases, most of which involved the country’s largest wholesale seafood market, were followed by only a small number of infections in Thailand over the past few months due to strict border and quarantine controls. On Sunday, a 78-year-old seafood vendor in Bangkok, who visited a shrimp market in Samut Sakhon province, tested positive. The second case involved a woman from central Thailand who worked in a beauty parlor in the north. Health officials say most of the cases at the seafood market are of migrant workers from Myanmar. The governor imposed a night curfew and other travel bans in Samut Sakhon province until January 3.
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