New South Wales has recorded 262 new community COVID-19 cases with at least 46 infectious in the community, Premier Gladys Berejiklian has confirmed.
It marks a drop from yesterday's record figure of 319 infections, but Ms Berejiklian cautioned that these numbers will likely "bounce around" in coming days.
"A day does not make a trend," she said.
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"There is always that concern about the tipping point where you start to see exponential growth – we certainly have not seen that, which is one positive, but obviously the trend is if you have successive days of a reduction in numbers.
"We don't have that yet."
There has also been one further death: a woman aged in her 80s who hadn't been vaccinated died at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital.
The woman had been living at the Wyoming Nursing Home in Summer Hill in Sydney's inner west, where a "super-spreading event" prompted a major outbreak that has since seen 18 residents and two staff members infected.
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It brings the total deaths during NSW's Delta outbreak to 28.
The number of people hospitalised with the virus has also increased to 362, including 58 in ICU.
Of these, 24 are on ventilators.
The Canterbury-Bankstown local government area continues to see the highest number of new cases, but a recent surge in infections in the Nepean has prompted a new hotspot declaration for 12 suburbs in the Penrith council area.
The suburbs are adjacent to the Cumberland and Liverpool LGAs and are as follows: Caddens, Claremont Meadows, Colyton, Erskine Park, Kemps Creek, Kingswood, Mount Vernon, North St Marys, Orchard Hills, Oxley Park, St Clair and St Marys.
From 5pm today, these suburbs will be subject to the same harsh restrictions as the eight other hotspot western Sydney LGAs, including a 5km travel radius for essential shopping and exercise and compulsory masks whenever leaving home.
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Residents are also banned from travelling outside the Penrith LGA for work unless they are on the NSW Government's list of authorised workers.
"We want to make sure we stem the tide of the virus seeping into those additional communities," Ms Berejiklian said.
In more positive news, high testing rates and subsiding case numbers could see the Georges River LGA – which takes in suburbs along the Georges River including Hurstville, Oatley, Blakehurst and Mortdale – removed from the hotspot list in the coming days.
"Congratulations to people in that area who have been following the advice, doing the right thing, and have seen a reduction in the number of cases," Ms Berejiklian said, as she continued to urge locals to come forward for testing.
One new case has been recorded in Armidale on its first full day of lockdown – a household contact of the two reported yesterday.
The snap week-long lockdown was announced for the regional town yesterday after the two cases were uncovered.
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It's thought a young person brought COVID-19 into the region from Newcastle, with the XPT Regional Train from Broadmeadow among the new close contact exposure sites.
There have also been three new cases on the NSW Central Coast, including two linked to the Lake Munmorah Public School where students have previously tested positive.
The third is a household contact of a case linked to a workplace in Sydney.
It comes as thousands of Sydneysiders roll up their sleeves as part of the day's vaccination blitz.
More than six weeks into Greater Sydney's hard lockdown and with case numbers continuing to climb ever-higher, the NSW Government is relying increasingly on vaccinations to curb the spread of the highly-infectious Delta outbreak.
The state saw its daily cases break the 300 barrier for the first time during the pandemic yesterday, with 319 new infections and the source of 194 of them unknown.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has repeatedly called on everyone in the state to take whatever vaccine is available to them in her daily coronavirus updates, with the aim of having 50 per cent of the population fully vaccinated – equating to roughly 6 million jabs – by the end of the month.
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"We are really keen to really sprint – this is a race," Ms Berejiklian declared today.
The premier said the state was currently on track to hit that 50 per cent target, with over 40 per cent of people now having received a first dose.
However, she cautioned that reaching that milestone wouldn't see a return to life pre-outbreak.
"What it does mean is that September can be a month where we have greater freedom than we do now," she said.
She flagged a return to the classroom for school students and the revitalisation of specific industries as key areas the goverment was considering reinstating.
NSW's vaccination strategy includes targeting particular high-risk groups.
Today is the first of a series of weekends where specific groups of essential workers will received prioritised access to the jabs at Sydney's mass vaccinations hubs.
Queues started to form early this morning outside the vaccination hub at Sydney Olympic Park, where 5,000 doses have been set aside for food vendors, including those working at supermarkets and serving takeaway food at cafes and restaurants.
Next Sunday, the government hopes to administer around 8,000 vaccination to construction workers as part of its plan to revive the hard-hit sector and see crucial construction projects resume.
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CSIRO Health Director Dr Rob Grenfell said the virus is establishing itself in Australia and it's now unlikely community transmission could be completely stamped out.
"We are in a transition phase for this pandemic," Dr Grenfell told the Weekend Today show this morning.
"We are moving into a phase where the virus certainly appears that it is establishing itself in the country.
"This was always going to happen at some stage of the pandemic. It would have been nicer to have occurred a little later when we had say many, many more people vaccinated, but it certainly appears that is what is happening."
Yet he insisted lockdowns remained a crucial weapon in quelling rising case numbers.
"If we weren't doing this in New South Wales at the moment – let's think about it – we'd be having tens of thousands of cases," he said.
"The US and UK are demonstrating that at the moment with Delta… The US had 200,000 cases yesterday for instance."
