South Australia has recorded 18 new cases of COVID-19 in the past 24 hours.
Key points:
- Authorities are dubbing cases from a high school reunion as the Norwood cluster
- 16 of 18 positive cases overnight are linked to the cluster
- Travellers from NSW will now be required to get a test on arrival
Sixteen of those cases are linked to what authorities are dubbing the "Norwood cluster" – which centres around a school reunion event which took place on Saturday night at a theatre hall in Adelaide's eastern suburbs.
The positive cases from that event include former SA Premier Jay Weatherill.
The remaining two new cases are people who appear to have become infected interstate.
SA Health expects all the new COVID-19 cases to be the Delta variant of the virus.
However, Premier Steven Marshall said local authorities were sufficiently concerned about the Omicron variant to impose a new requirement for all travellers from New South Wales to be tested on arrival in SA.
"We'll be monitoring the situation particularly in New South Wales extraordinarily carefully, we'll be monitoring it on a daily basis," Mr Marshall said.
It is the second time the state has changed border arrangements since opening its borders to New South Wales, Victoria and ACT on November 23.
Mr Marshall said South Australia's vaccination rate was at about 90 per cent first dose for people aged 12 and over.
He said he was not at all surprised by the current case numbers in the state since borders were opened.
"When you look at the projections, and of course it is only a model so you don't know until you get actual numbers in, they were predicting that there was a 27 per cent chance we could actually have more than 100 cases for three days in a row," he said.
"Now look, we are nowhere near that, I think we have now had a very few number of cases, certainly less than 30 since last Tuesday ... I think that's perfectly within the bounds of the model, in fact it's probably at the lower end."
Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said there were about 50 people at the Norwood event.
"All of the people at that event were vaccinated, while vaccination of course reduces your symptoms and reduces your risk of hospitalisation, it does still mean that you can still get infected," she said.
"Within the event, and now that we've got those new cases, all of those cases will have quite a number of people that they would have been in close contact with."
Professor Spurrier said there were about 210 close contacts currently in quarantine, with that number expected to grow throughout the day.
Responding to questions about exposure sites not being listed on the SA Health website promptly, Professor Spurrier said contact tracers needed time to do their jobs.
"What I don't want is to have exposure sites that are not exposure sites listed on social media," she said.
"This is actually quite a complicated process, as I explained, we will have some higher risk exposure sites and our focus is prioritising those.
"So there will be, as the numbers go on, other exposure sites that we decide not even to list or even call as a casual contact and this is a learning experience for us in our state.
"If we've listed it as an exposure site it means that our contact tracing team, when they've done their risk assessment, feel that that is a particular site of concern and don't feel that they've got 100 per cent of people who may be close contacts and that's the reason for putting it up as a public listing."
Check the table below to find all the South Australian exposure sites and times. More are expected to be listed.
You can find information on testing site hours and the nearest site to you on the SA Health website.
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2021-12-02 02:48:19Z
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