Covid-19: Thousands of police deployed to stop Australian anti-lockdown protests

New South Wales has recorded 1331 locally aquired cases and six deaths.

Four women and two men were the deaths reported today. One was in their 40s, one in their 60s, two in their 70s, and two in their 80s.

Three of the six who died were not vaccinated and the other three had received one dose.

Thousands of police officers in Sydney and Melbourne were deployed to quell planned anti-lockdown protests, setting up checkpoints and barricades.

Several hundred people managed to gather in downtown Melbourne and local media reported some early arrests and clashes with the police, as 2000 officers made the area virtually a no-go zone. Public transport and ride shares into the city were suspended.

In Sydney, riot squad officers, highway patrol, detectives and general duties police were also deployed to the streets.

NSW Health's Dr Jeremy McAnulty said 81.2 percent of the over-16 population had received their first dose of the vaccine and 50.6 percent are now fully vaccinated.

Queensland today recorded one locally acquired case while Victoria recorded 535 cases and one death.

The Queensland case is linked to the Sunnybank cluster and was detected in home quarantine.

Chief Health Officer Dr Jeannette Young said today's case was "another example of where a family did such a wonderful job so we didn't need to go into lockdown."

"I honestly thought that we would need to, but we didn't because of that tremendous family."

She said today's case was "so helpful with giving us the names and details of all his contacts so we could get them into quarantine."

"If we hadn't been able to do that with all of these case, we'd have had a major outbreak."

Of the 535 local cases in Melbourne, 62 have so far been linked to known cases and outbreaks.

They were detected from more than 61,000 test results processed yesterday.

There were also 45,537 vaccines administered at state-run sites.

- With Reuters