Australia Covid live update: NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian to hold 2pm press conference amid Sydney lockdown and surge in cases

If we’re going to do this, we need to do it properly. There’s no point doing a three-day and then having the virus continue to bubble away in the community.

Now, if after seven days there’s a dramatic change in the trend, we’ll obviously evaluate the situation. But at this stage, the best health advice we have is that a two-week period, or until midnight on Friday July 9, is necessary in order to make sure that we get to our target of zero community transmission, which has always been our target from the beginning of the pandemic.

Given how transmissible the virus is, given the extra exposure venues, we know that even the best contact tracers in the world can’t stay a step ahead unless we put this in, and we need to do it properly. So there was no point doing it for three days or five days because it wouldn’t have done the job.

The best health advice today is that it should be for two weeks, but if there is any massive improvement ahead of that time, of course, we’ll evaluate that. But the best advice we have from Dr Chant and the health experts is that we should brace ourselves for more cases.

We’re finding that all household contacts, unfortunately, are getting the virus. Transmissibility is at least double what previous variants had been. So we do need to brace ourselves for potentially larger number of cases in the following days.