Coronavirus: ‘Terrifying’ as Sydney’s northern beaches turn into ghost town

It’s eerily silent in the usually busy Westfield Warringah Mall, a large shopping centre in the middle of Sydney’s northern beaches.

It’s eerily silent in the usually busy Westfield Warringah Mall, a large shopping centre in the middle of Sydney’s northern beaches — the peninsula now in the grip of a ­coronavirus panic amid rising ­infections.

There’s only one queue. It’s across the road at the Brookvale COVID-19 testing facility.

The homewares store hasn’t had a customer in hours, staff tell The Weekend Australian. In a nearby coffee shop, the barista now expects Christmas to be “very grim”.

Further up the coast, closer to the cluster’s epicentre, Newport fashion retailer Jenny Blake anxiously taps her vivid pin nails against a glass counter.

“It’s terrifying," she says. “Every shopping strip from Narrabeen to Palm Beach has basically shut down.”

It’s the Friday before Christmas, and the northern beaches, typically bustling with tourists, is like a ghost town.

The only busy stores are supermarkets, where the toilet paper has again been stripped from shelves.

As in the early days of the pandemic, shoppers have been buying up bulk quantities of anything on offer.

John Gercsov goes shopping in full PPE at Coles Mona Vale on Friday. Picture: Monique Harmer

By early afternoon at Woolworths Mona Vale, there are only a small number of sausages left in the meat section.

The Coles at Dee Why was equally bereft of produce.

The peninsula’s idyllic beaches, meanwhile, are off limits until at least Monday, following a decision to lower the red and yellow flags from North Palm Beach to Manly.

“We are backing the government’s call for residents of the northern beaches to stay at home for the next few days,” Surf Life Saving NSW chief executive Steven Pearce said.

At Long Reef, a solitary surfer slips into the waves while a woman briefly lifts her mask to scold an unruly dog.

“It’s scary, and it’s clearly far from over,” says Stephanie John, a 24-year-old student who stood in line at an Avalon testing site, where crowds of people fidgeted with their masks and flicked through their phones while they waited to be tested.

With 250,000 people now under the most restrictive conditions that any part of NSW has experienced since April, the humid December air is thick with worry.