Coronavirus: Police convoys warn sunbakers and families in parks

Police cars enter harbourside parks and beaches to warn sunbakers and families over new lockdown orders

A police car drives through a park in Rushcutters Bay, eastern Sydney. Picture: Sky News

Large convoys of NSW police are targeting the parks and beaches of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, ordering people caught loitering or sunbaking to go home immediately.

In extraordinary scenes at Rushcutters Bay on Tuesday, a convoy of five patrol cars began driving through the busy harbourside park, directing people from the safety of their vehicles to comply with the latest lockdown orders.

Those who weren’t exercising were warned they were in breach of the new lockdown orders.

Further south on Coogee Beach, the NSW Police riot squad was called in to order locals to move on after a large crowd had swarmed to the beachfront for the late afternoon sun.

“To those that continue to flout the laws that have been put into place, we can put you in jail for six months,” NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said.

The unprecedented push by police to crack down on Sydneysiders who breach the lockdown orders follows a series of COVID-19 related arrests in the past two days.

A 30-year-old Sydney man who breached self-isolation orders three times on the weekend sobbed as we was told by a magistrate on Tuesday he would not be released from prison after he was ordered to undergo a mental-health assessment on Monday.

Matthew Adam Stephan faces a year in jail after he was arrested on Sunday while trying to leave a serviced apartment in Camperdown, in the city’s inner-west. The court heard he violated a COVID-19 public health order after he was ordered to self-isolate on his return from Jordan two weeks ago.

The mental-health assessment revealed Stephan was not mentally ill, but noted he had drug-induced psychosis in his past and an intellectual disability, the court was told.

“It says here his insight into his behaviour remains minimal,” Central Local Court magistrate Margaret Quinn said on Tuesday during his bail application.

On Tuesday a 17-year-old girl, who allegedly spat in the eye of a 19-year-old woman in the city’s inner-west, was charged with a series of offences. The alleged victim was assisted by witnesses to flush her eye out and seek medical assistance.

NSW Health is so concerned about the spread of the COVID-19 virus in Sydney’s eastern suburbs that the first of a series of pop-up testing clinics is expected to start operating on Wednesday, right on the beachfront at the Bondi Pavilion

Bondi Beach and the neighbouring suburb of Waverley have significantly higher infection rates than any part of the country, with fears backpackers may have helped spread the virus throughout the community.

“We know there has been an outbreak among backpackers in Bondi,” NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said on Tuesday.

“We have had a small number of cases in that community where there aren’t obvious links, but a plausible explanation is they have come into contact with an infected backpacker before that backpacker was aware they had COVID-19.”

St Vincent’s Hospital is supervising the establishment of pop-up testing clinics across the Bondi area over the next week.

“We’ve been identifying a large number of young adults (infected with the virus), particularly in the Bondi and Bondi Junction area,” Dr Gail Matthews, an infectious diseases specialist at St Vincents Hospital, told Channel Nine News.