SYDNEY • Sydney reported a record daily number of new coronavirus infections yesterday, and Victoria state entered a snap one-week lockdown as Australia struggles to contain an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant.

Sydney, Australia's largest city and the capital of New South Wales state, is nearing the seventh week of its own nine-week lockdown. It reported five deaths and a record 262 infections in the past 24 hours.

Victoria said it has detected eight new cases, the bulk of which could not be traced to a known infection, triggering the sixth lockdown for the state's more than six million people from late yesterday.

"Nothing about this is optional. This is a lockdown, it will be enforced, for the best of reasons and the best purposes, to bring these case numbers down, under control so we can once again be open," Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews told reporters in Melbourne.

Australia now has its three most populous cities - Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane - in hard lockdowns, threatening to drive the country's A$2 trillion (S$2 trillion) economy into a second recession in as many years.

Brisbane reported another 16 Covid-19 cases yesterday, the same number as the previous two days. It has been under a lockdown since last Saturday.

The Hunter region in New South Wales, home to the state's second-largest city of Newcastle, was also due to be locked down from late yesterday after six new cases.

Officials suspect that the virus in the Hunter region spread from a beach party near Newcastle after people travelled from Sydney, in an apparent violation of the city's lockdown.

"Our strongest focus... is getting to the bottom of how the disease was transmitted and introduced into Newcastle," New South Wales chief health officer Kerry Chant told reporters in Sydney.

With about 35,200 Covid-19 cases and 932 deaths, Australia has avoided the high caseloads of other developed countries, but its vaccination figures are among the lowest, with only 20 per cent of its population over the age of 16 fully vaccinated.

Four of the five people who died in Sydney were unvaccinated, while one had one dose, state health officials said, as they implored residents to get inoculated as early as possible.

The five who died were three men in their 60s, one man in his 70s and a woman in her 80s, taking the total number of deaths in the latest outbreak in New South Wales to 21.

Health experts expect the country to endure stop-and-start lockdowns until it reaches high vaccination coverage, but lawmakers are under mounting pressure to ease restrictions for those who are unable to work.

"I am a fortunate one to be in essential service, so I am still working, still getting paid. For other people, it is a mixed bag. Some people are taking it really well, and others not so well," pharmacy sales staff member Keirom O'Donoughue, who works in one of the worst-affected suburbs of Bankstown in Sydney, told Reuters.

REUTERS