New South Wales has recorded 390 locally acquired Covid-19 cases in the 24 hours to 8pm yesterday, the premier says.
A health worker undertakes swab tests at a Covid-19 testing site in Sydney. Photo: AFP
Health authorities said two more people also died after contracting the virus.
One was an unvaccinated woman in her 40s who died in her south-western Sydney home. She was a close contact of a previous case.
The other was a man in his late 90s in the Hunter New England region. He was fully vaccinated but was in palliative care.
Of today's cases, 58 were infectious in the community and 43 were in the community for part of their infectious period.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the high number of daily cases, particularly the cases who were infectious while in the community, didn't look like it would decline.
"I anticipate, given the large number of cases we have had in the last few days, that unfortunately this trend will continue for at least the next few days," she said.
The premier expressed frustration with the "handful" of people knowingly breaching rules and consequentially locking down entire regions across NSW.
She said the state government and the NSW police would be looking at tightening public health orders and introducing further compliance measures.
"For example, there was one person who knowingly did the wrong thing and has caused havoc in about seven or eight Local Government Areas in western NSW," Berejiklian said.
"I am a bit tired of hearing people say they don't know what they are supposed to do. It is really people knowingly having disregard unfortunately for the loved ones and also the rest of us in breaching the health orders."
There were 128,000 tests completed in the reporting period.
Queensland cases linked to schools
Meanwhile, Queensland has recorded seven new community cases of Covid-19 with Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk saying "virus creep" from NSW was very concerning.
All the new cases were in home quarantine and linked to the Delta outbreak, which started at the Indooroopilly State High School, in Brisbane's west.
The new cases are linked to three schools - St Aidan's Anglican Girls School, Brisbane Grammar School and Ironside State School - with positive cases detected on days 10, 11 and 12.
There are now 137 cases in the Delta cluster and a total of 158 active cases in the state after 35,503 tests were conducted in the past 24 hours.
Out of those tests, 4266 were in Cairns, where lockdown lifted earlier this week.
Premier seeks explanation from NSW
Palaszczuk said she hoped to get an update from New South Wales at the national Cabinet meeting today about how it plans to stop the spread of Delta into other states.
"From Queensland's point of view, we are very concerned about how the clusters are continuing to expand," Palaszczuk said.
"I think we would need to hear very clearly from New South Wales what their clear plan is for containment.
"The last thing we want to see is this virus spread north, the virus spread south, and spread across the nation.
"So, it's absolutely imperative that New South Wales contains this virus."
Yesterday the premier warned Queenslanders not to travel into NSW.
Mystery cases cause concern in Melbourne
The number of mystery cases in Melbourne's outbreak has surged to eight, after four more unlinked infections were recorded on Thursday.
The number of exposure sites now exceeds 400, with South Melbourne Market among the latest additions
The state recorded 15 new local Covid-19 cases, eight of whom were in quarantine during their infectious period.
But only 11 of the latest cases have been linked back to current outbreaks, with the source of the remaining four under investigation.
Contact tracers were already grappling with four mystery cases spread across Glenroy and Brunswick West.
There were 40,737 test results processed on Thursday and 27,427 vaccine doses were administered at state-run sites.
- ABC