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After a 19th resident at Summer Hill’s Wyoming aged care home tested positive to COVID-19, NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant has asked the sector to try to limit the number of agency staff they use.

Her call came after it was revealed a nurse had worked across three sites while infectious with COVID-19, including Wyoming.

“We want to have least mobility of workers across multiple facilities so I would urge that people that are using agencies try to ask for the same agency staff,” she said.

The Chief Health Officer added that aged care providers should be making sure their agency staff have access to vaccination “immediately”.

Asked why Sydneysiders should bring forward their second AstraZeneca dose for greater protection from severe disease sooner (although slightly reduced protection from catching the virus compared to a 12-week interval), NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant says people should not think they will only have two coronavirus vaccines in their life.

“We’re going to be vaccinated multiple times against the COVID virus,” Dr Chant said.

“At the moment we’re trading off long-term protection versus short-term protection: both vaccines after one dose reduce your risk of hospitalisation and, after two doses, they’re equivalent.”

Dr Chant said the world was entering a “challenging, transitional space” with virus management through vaccines.

“What will happen is [COVID-19] will be a bit like flu eventually, she said, adding the virus would likely become cyclical and protection would be given through ongoing vaccination.

Dr Chant said she understood vaccine advisory ATAGI was looking at mixing vaccine brands and booster shots going forward and her advice would always mirror theirs.

“Vaccine manufacture has improved a lot in having the mRNA vaccines, like Moderna and Pfizer, and I understand they can be changed quite quickly a little along the lines of the flu vaccine that changes every year,” she said.

“That gives us hope that we can stay ahead of the virus.”

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says returning HSC students to school is a “priority” for her government, but stands by statements made yesterday that the return of other children will depend on case numbers and vaccination rates.

She said the government was looking at “options” to return some Greater Sydney students where the virus may be less of a risk.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian at today’s COVID-19 briefing. Credit:Nick Moir

“I know this is little consolation for the eight local government areas, but in the main, we have managed to keep the virus out of the regions so all the kids there are face to face,” she said.

“The virus has been kept out of the Central Coast and other places and parts of Greater Sydney: we’re looking at options [to return students] in a safe way that will be based on health advice at the time.

“The two priorities remain for us getting kids back to face-to-face learning and to allow parents or adults to get back to the workplace.”

NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said NSW Health was “working closely” with industry and the school sector to determine how rapid antigen testing for Year 12s would operate when they return on August 16.

“We’re just working through the issues in schools in terms of what would be the appropriate risk mitigations we put in place,” she said.

In recent days, many exposure sites listed by NSW Health have been supermarkets, but Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant says it is important for the public to know transmission in these settings is very rare.

“Just because they’re there doesn’t mean that they’ve actually transmitted,” Dr Chant said, noting it was “expected” supermarkets would be a common exposure site during lockdown measures.

NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant. Credit:Nick Moir

Dr Chant said the situations in which COVID-19 had been transmitted in a supermarket had “generally” been when a staff member had infected another staff member after catching the virus in the community.

“We don’t actually think the large supermarkets are a great risk,” she added, noting there was more concern about smaller shops where more crowding may occur.

“We’re urging for those small businesses [to] minimise the number in the shop, make people wait outdoors â€" just to avoid points where you might have interaction.”

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton says that misinformation and disinformation are impacting vaccine uptake in areas throughout the state.

“It is always going to be the case that there are disparities between local government areas. We need to acknowledge it,” he said.

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton. Credit:Chris Hopkins

“There’ll be some areas that are more subject to misinformation and disinformation from online sources and other social networks that they’re engaged in, we need to again, understand, recognise that and respond to it appropriately.

“We need to recognise it and it’s really useful to have that detailed granular information so that we can tailor our engagement to maximise the vaccination coverage in those areas.”

He said Victorian vaccine levels were comparatively strong against other Australian states.

“The story for Victoria is that we’ve got very good, very high vaccination coverage again on a per capita basis, doing as well as any of the big states so that’s a good news story,” he said.

“There will always be some disparity in terms of regional differences by local government areas, and it tends to align a little bit more with social disadvantage, we’ve seen that across the world.”

Asked a series of questions about what the pathway out of Greater Sydney’s lockdown would look like and why this has not been made publicly available, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian says there is not enough certainty.

“I think it’s very, very important for us to communicate definite information to the public around what life will look like on 29 August and we don’t know the answer to that yet,” the Premier said.

Ms Berejiklian said the government still wanted community infections to be “as close to zero as possible” before restrictions were eased, noting a 50 per cent vaccination rate would also give a level of protection.

“Can I be very clear? We would never relax completely at 50 per cent vaccination rates,” she added.

The Premier denied the premise of a question that asked how many unnecessary deaths she would accept to reopen at 50 per cent vaccination.

“Obviously, once vaccination rates hit 70 per cent and 80 per cent, that is a different proposition,” she said.

“But given where our vaccination rates are, our intent as a government is to keep our population, first and foremost, safe.”

Amid reports of dwindling vaccine supply in Sydney’s south-west â€" where vaccination rates lag behind the rest of the city and the bulk of cases continue to be detected â€" NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant said a system had been put in place where pharmacies participating in the rollout could call a hotline to order more vaccines.

“Ring that and stress the urgency of it and please keep ringing and escalate,” Dr Chant urged pharmacists. “It’s too critical. I do not want anyone turned away in south-western Sydney, or anywhere for that matter, who wants a vaccination.”

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton says the state set a new record for the number of check-ins on a single day, using the app to register their presence at venues throughout the state more than 6.1 million times on Saturday.

Professor Sutton said the app was used almost 11 million times over the entire weekend.

Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton. Credit:Wayne Taylor

“It’s really becoming a part of our habits, as it should be,” he said.

“It’s played a very significant role in our ability to track down primary close contacts, people who’ve gone to exposure sites, and for us to be able to contact them within a very short period of time so that they can quarantine appropriately.”

Professor Sutton also said that Victorian authorities would be looking at reviewing restrictions next Tuesday.

At present, Victorians are not allowed to visit the houses of other people, even family, if they don’t live alone.

“We need to drive this right down before ... we undertake a really significant review that will be next Tuesday,” Professor Sutton said.

“We’ll absolutely look at home visits, along with everything else.”

After hinting earlier in the press conference that her government is considering incentives for people to get vaccinated, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian declined to say whether she supported federal Labor’s suggestion of a $300 payment.

“We’ve been looking at incentives for some time in the NSW government,” the Premier said.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant arriving for today’s press conference. Credit:Nick Moir

“We’re focusing on what we believe people want at this stage: they want peace of mind that they can move more freely, send their kids to school, work.

“Any incentives around those things we think are great motivators so we’re looking at those options.”

The Premier said she was concerned to read reports Sydneysiders had spent hours attempting to book a vaccine.

“We are definitely looking at that,” the Premier said, adding she wanted the process to be “as easy as possible”.

“If there’s anything we can do to improve the system, we will. But everybody has to go to the Health Direct system, a federal system, so we have to mesh our systems with that,” she added.

There are 53 cases in intensive care units in NSW, the state’s Chief Health Officer has revealed, including 43 people who have not received a single dose of vaccine.

“I think this underscores the severity of COVID and our data indicates that we are seeing more hospitalisations associated with the Delta strain,” Kerry Chant said at today’s press conference.

The intensive care cases include five people aged in their 20s, six in their 30s, three in their 40s, 18 in their 50s, 11 in their 60s and 10 in their 70s.

“My big callout is to get vaccinated, across all of the age groups,” Dr Chant said.

“I look at the vaccine coverage data every night, which is on the Commonwealth website, and it really is quite tragic that we’ve got still people in their 90s that are unprotected â€" people in their 80s, 70s and 60s.”

There are 250 people in hospital with COVID-19 in NSW.

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