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 So far, at least 300 people have been infected since the first case
was reported in the beachfront Bondi suburb of Australia's largest
city, on June 16.
The threat posed by the fast spreading Delta variant, in a country
that has been slow to vaccinate, persuaded New South Wales state
government to put Sydney, a city of five million people, under
lockdown for two weeks.
But, on Monday it reported 35 locally acquired new cases, matching
the worst daily figure for infections this year.
"We expect the case numbers of people in isolation to keep going
up," state Premier Gladys Berejiklian told reporters. "What we are
really looking at are the number of people who have still been
infectious in the community and what impact that will have in the
next few days."
Of Monday's cases, 28 were in isolation throughout or for part of
their infectious period. Seven cases spent time in the community
while infectious.
"The next couple of days will be absolutely critical," Berejiklian
said.
While Sydney continued to struggle contain the Delta variant, first
detected in India, the less hard-hit cities of Perth, Brisbane and
Darwin came out of lockdowns over the weekend.
Berejiklian said the lockdown in NSW had limited new cases to tens
rather than hundreds, although she said many people had breached
health orders, helping the virus to spread.
Several players of an Australian rugby league team were fined
A$1,000 ($750) by NSW police for breaching public health orders
after throwing a party.
VACCINE WOES
Lockdowns, contact tracing and compliance with social distancing
rules have helped suppress past outbreaks in Australia, with just
over 30,750 COVID-19 cases and 910 deaths since the pandemic began.
But with closed borders and limits on domestic movement a
year-and-a-half into the pandemic, state leaders have become more
critical of the slow vaccine rollout, with less than 10% of the 20
million adult population fully vaccinated.
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 The federal government has said
it is expecting more imports of the Pfizer Inc
vaccine, the main recommended medication for
people under 60, and indicated it wants to focus
on ways to reopen the economy without focusing
on daily infection numbers.
"Ultimately, we can't eliminate the virus,"
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters.
"Our focus is on living with the virus and ensuring as many people
are vaccinated as possible and that we can mitigate what are the
real threats from the virus which are the hospitalisation, serious
illness and ultimately, the fatalities that we have seen in large
numbers around the rest of the world."
In Queensland, authorities said nearly 140,000 people who have
registered for Pfizer shots might have to wait until October or
November due to supply shortages. Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt
said he had promised Queensland 198,000 extra Pfizer shots this
month.
Meanwhile authorities in neighbouring New Zealand said 150,000
Pfizer doses, its largest shipment to date, had arrived, just days
before the country was set to run out of supplies.
New Zealand extended its pause in quarantine-free travel to and from
New South Wales and Queensland, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said
in a media conference on Monday, although New Zealand would reopen
its "travel bubble" with people arriving from Western Australia
state and Northern territory.
Like in Australia, about 9% of New Zealand's 5 million population
has been fully vaccinated, while over 1.1 million people have
received at least one dose.
($1 = 1.3293 Australian dollars)
(Reporting by Renju Jose and Byron Kaye in Sydney and Praveen Menon
in Wellington; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell & Simon Cameron-Moore)
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