NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has announced that as of April 20, people living in a household with someone who has tested positive for Covid-19 will no longer be required to isolate themselves for seven days unless they also test positive. The lifting of this precaution means that there are no longer any close contact isolation rules in place in NSW.
Perrottet also announced that green dots, which had been used to manage social distancing, will be removed from public transport, and vaccination mandates for some professions will also be lifted. Masks will still be mandatory on all public transport vehicles and hubs including train stations and airports.
It was also announced that the Perrottet government would be discontinuing hotel quarantine saying, “Hotel quarantine has proven to be incredibly successful over the course of the pandemic, but from this position we are in now, hotel quarantine will cease.”
Perrottet added that, while “this is not the end of the pandemic”, the hospitalitalisation and death rates in the state had reached a level where restrictions were no longer needed. “Today is a day where the people of our state can be incredibly proud to be in a position where we have an incredibly low death rate. We have put downward pressure on our health system and that is because of the efforts and sacrifices people have made.”
The seven-day average of daily cases in NSW is currently 13,400 new infections, although health authorities have warned that the true number of new cases is likely to be far higher due to unreported positive RAT results. 61.8 per cent of the adult population over the age of 18 in NSW have received three doses of a vaccine.