NSW records eight new COVID-19 cases, infections at BWS Berala put authorities on edge

Coronavirus has spread between people at the Berala BWS even during brief visits to the store.(AAP: Dan Himbrechts)

Eight new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in NSW and contact tracers are tackling a “concerning” amount of transmission at a bottle shop in Sydney’s west.

Two cases are connected to the Avalon cluster on the northern beaches, five are connected to the Berala cluster in Sydney’s west and one is a household contact of a case in Wollongong.

Almost 19,000 tests were conducted in the past 24 hours.

The Berala cluster has now reached 13 cases and Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said the virus had spread easily during short visits to the BWS store on Woodburn Road in Berala.

“Irrespective of if you think it was just a fleeting visit to this premises, we want you to act in a very precautionary way and are asking for your assistance,” she said.

There is a health alert for anyone who visited the bottle shop on December 20 as well as every day between December 22 and December 31.

“This is critical and I can’t stress enough how concerned we are about the transmission potential,” Dr Chant said.

“Can we please just everyone in that community respond? I know you can do it.

“We have set up a number of testing clinics and I would just ask that you go forward and just act in a very precautionary way.”

More than 2,000 people who attended the BWS have already been contacted and health authorities are reviewing CCTV footage to understand how transmission occurred.

Dr Chant said tens of thousands of people had been asked to isolate because all secondary cases of close contacts must quarantine until they received a negative test result.

“We will be attempting to contact you, but our records might be incomplete in terms of who was at that premise, so please reach out to your friends and family who you know used that bottle shop and check with them,” Dr Chant said.

She said the most “concerning” aspect of the transmission was how brief the exposure of cases had been at the BWS.

Genomic sequencing has also revealed the Berala cluster, which is sitting at 13 cases, is linked to a quarantine transport driver who tested positive last month.

She said a close contact of that patient transport worker visited the Berala BWS on December 20 and triggered the cluster.

“A family group who had returned from overseas were transported to a health facility … unfortunately one of the patient transport workers acquired infection, passed it on to a colleague, [and] that colleague had been at the Berala BWS for a very fleeting amount of time, but what we now know is that transmission occurred,” Dr Chant said.

Face masks are now mandatory at indoor venues across Greater Sydney, which includes the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains and Wollongong.

Health Minister Brad Hazzard said common sense would apply, but “if you don’t have a good excuse, you will be fined” from midnight tomorrow.

“In wearing a mask, you will be keeping yourself, your locals, your families, your community, and, of course, possibly eventually the whole of New South Wales safe,” Mr Hazzard said.

A $200 fine applies for failing to wear a mask in the relevant spaces, which include public transport, all shops, beauty parlours, theatres and places of worship.

ABC