New South Wales

Two travellers from the United Kingdom were found to be infected with the newly detected UK Covid-19 strain after arriving in New South Wales, Australia. The two individuals have been placed in hotel quarantine.

A hotel worker in Sydney has tested positive for coronavirus. She was employed by two hotels in Darling Harbour, one of which is a quarantine hotel for returned international travellers.

It is the first case of COVID-19 in the state for 26 days.

New South Wales Health is asking anyone who worked at the hotels on these dates to get tested and self-isolate.

It is unclear how other states will respond to the announcement, with New South Wales open to all states besides Western Australia, which was due to ease restrictions on the 8th of December.

Queensland will open its borders to Victoria on December 1 after the state recorded 26 days with no new coronavirus cases, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced today.

Ms Palaszczuk announced yesterday that Queensland would also open up to all of New South Wales on the same date.

No decision has been made about when Queensland will open borders to South Australia. Parts of the state were declared a hotspot following a coronavirus cluster outbreak last week.

It has been seven days since Australia last recorded a local coronavirus case.

With the last recorded case originating in New South Wales a week ago, the country is on track to open most borders by Christmas.

Comparatively, it has been 224 days since the Northern Territory last had an active local case.

Coronavirus could "die out" in Australia in weeks if New South Wales and Victoria continue with low infection numbers, experts believe.

Victoria has recorded eight days straight with no new cases, and all of New South Wales' recent infections have been tracked from known sources.

However, Australia had also managed to flatten the curve in May, before cases escalated again.

A 13-year-old boy has been bitten by a shark at Town Beach in Port Macquarie, off the New South Wales coast in Australia.

He was taken to Port Macquarie Base Hospital where he is currently in a stable condition.

Town Beach has been closed, after the fourth shark attack on the Mid North Coast since April.

New South Wales reports seven new Covid-19 cases in the past 24 hours, five of which were locally transmitted.

Premier Daniel Andrews expressed frustration with the Australian Border Force and Kingsford Smith Airport during a press conference over a technicality that allowed 17 travellers from New Zealand to enter Victoria despite the state's lockdown. The identity of the travellers has yet to be determined.

Tasmanian devils are returning back to Australia after a 3,000-year-absence. Eleven of the carnivorous marsupials have been released into a 400-hectare wildlife sanctuary north of Sydney, New South Wales, Australian, the conservation group Aussie Ark that aided in the reintroduction program said in a statement.

"In 100 years, we are going to be looking back at this day as the day that set in motion the ecological restoration of an entire country. Not only is this the reintroduction of one of Australia's beloved animals, but of an animal that will engineer the entire environment around it, restoring and rebalancing our forest ecology after centuries of devastation from introduced foxes and cats and other invasive predators," so Aussie Ark president Tim Faulkner.

As Victoria sees a record daily COVID number of 484 cases, the state has closed over 100 schools and early childhood services. New South Wales reported 16 cases, while Queensland and South Australia only saw one case each, bringing the total cases in Australia to 502 – making it the country's highest daily COVID case count since March 28.

The city of Sydney has announced that it has begun switching 100% of the electricity for the city to energy from renewable sources. According to the official announcement on the cities website they struck a deal to purchase energy from three different generators in New South Wales that is equivalent to 100% of the city's usage. The electricity comes in 3/4 from wind generation and 1/4 from solar generation and will be added to the electricity grid of the city.

Since the 1st of July, the city has started getting electricity from these generators with the aim of completing the switch to getting 100% of the cities electricity from these sources in 2021.

In order to contain the further spread of Covid-19, Australian officials have closed the state border between Victoria and New South Wales – the first time since the 1919 Spanish flu pandemic. Melbourne has seen a recent surge in Covid-19 cases, putting 30 suburbs on strict social-distancing orders. Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews told reporters that the decision was "a smart call [...] given the significant challenges."

After the Australian bushfires in the beginning of 2020 the critically endangered smoky mouse had been feared have become wiped out. Now the New South Wales Office of Environment has spotted multiple of them alive in the Australian Kosciuszko national park. Matt Kean the New South Wales environment minister has stated that "We are relieved and delighted by this news as we were fearing the worst as more than 90% of their habitat was burnt".

The spacetravel company Rocket Lab has successfully resumed its operations and carried a payload for NASA, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office and the University of New South Wales Canberra into orbit. Being pushed back due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Electron rocket has been successfully launched from the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand.

Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison is urging Western Australia and Queensland to allow travellers to cross interstate borders by July as he's “very keen to see Australia’s economy continue to reopen on the timetable for interstate travel”. Australia has seen a decline in Covid-19 cases but premiers of Queensland, South and Western Australia are not yet willing to reopen their borders for interstate travel. Morrison warns of the economic impact, especially on the tourism industry. “If I get planes flying between Australia and New Zealand, I want them flying between New South Wales and Queensland and Western Australia and South Australia”, said Morrison.