Greater Sydney Covid lockdown extended for extra week with schools to offer online learning

Greater Sydney will remain in lockdown for an extra week, and schools won’t open as expected after the holiday break, as New South Wales battles to get on top of its growing Covid outbreak.

Guardian Australia understands the premier, Gladys Berejiklian, will announce on Wednesday morning that existing restrictions will remain in place until midnight on Friday 16 July.

Sydney, the Blue Mountains, the Central Coast, Wollongong and Shellharbour had been scheduled to emerge from lockdown this Friday.

The decision means students in greater Sydney will be required to attend classes online next week from Tuesday to Friday. Regional schools, however, will reopen for face-to-face learning as planned on 13 July for term three.

The decision was made by the NSW government’s crisis cabinet committee after extended meetings on Tuesday. It is understood the committee is working on a plan with further details on how the state will come out of lockdown in 10 days.

Epidemiologists told Guardian Australia on Tuesday – before the extension was revealed – that Berejiklian had no choice but to continue greater Sydney’s lockdown.

Prof Catherine Bennett, the chair of epidemiology at Deakin University, said an extension was inevitable.

“I don’t think there is a choice now, the proportion of cases infectious in the community, even if just a day, is still sufficient to make it problematic,” Bennett said. “If you open up, and these people could be mixing in the community, you could get back very quickly to higher numbers.”

Bennett said the key remained to ensure all new cases were isolated for their full infectious period. “You want to see that for a few days, to make sure that that’s now the pattern, and you’re not seeing other new cases emerge,” she said.

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Berejiklian said on Tuesday the length of the lockdown would be informed by the fact the NSW government wanted this to be the state’s last. “We intend for this lockdown to be the only lockdown we go through,” she said.

The premier said NSW had the best contact tracers in the world but the Deltra strain was “something new during the pandemic”. “It is not something we have seen before and that’s why it requires a different type of response,” she said on Tuesday.

Berejiklian said she was aware it was “stressful” for parents to have their children at home for schooling but decisions were always “based on the health advice”.

NSW reported 18 new local Covid cases on Tuesday including two people who were infectious in the community and five who were partially in isolation. The source of two of the cases remained under investigation.

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While it was a significant drop on the 35 cases reported on Monday, there remained a number of concerning clusters, including 10 cases linked to the SummitCare nursing home in Baulkham Hills.

Six residents have tested positive and four staff. The most recent worker tested positive on Tuesday night but had been in isolation since 1 July, a SummitCare spokesperson said.

There are 26 people with Covid in hospital in NSW. Six are in intensive care with two requiring ventilation.