A woman is seen wearing a face mask as preventative measure as COVID-19 continues to spread across Australia on March 18, 2020 in Melbourne. Photo / Getty Images
A woman is seen wearing a face mask as preventative measure as COVID-19 continues to spread across Australia on March 18, 2020 in Melbourne. Photo / Getty Images
Australian coronavirus cases are approaching 600 after NSW reported a massive 59 new cases, Victoria another 26 and Queensland another 16 on Wednesday.
The total number of confirmed cases, based on a tally of numbers provided by health authorities in each state and territory, now stands at 568. At least 43 have fully recovered.
There are 267 in New South Wales, 121 in Victoria, 94 in Queensland, 37 in South Australia, 35 in Western Australia, 10 in Tasmania, three in the Australian Capital Territory and one in the Northern Territory
Six people have died – one in Western Australia and five in New South Wales.
Australia's first coronavirus fatality was on Sunday, March 1.
He was a 78-year-old Perth man who was among 163 Australians evacuated from the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan and quarantined at Howard Springs in the Northern Territory.
The second death came on Tuesday, March 3. The 95-year-old woman was a resident at the Dorothy Henderson Lodge in Macquarie Park, in Sydney's north.
Two other residents of the same nursing home later died — an 82-year-old man on Sunday, March 8, followed by a 90-year-old woman on Saturday, March 14.
On Friday, March 13, a 77-year-old woman died in a Sydney hospital after recently arriving from Brisbane. She had developed symptoms on the plane, was taken to hospital and died the same day.
An 86-year-old man died in a Sydney hospital on Tuesday, March 17, making him the state's fifth death and the country's sixth.
CORONAVIRUS IN AUSTRALIA
People in their 50s make up the greatest proportion of confirmed cases, followed by those in their 30s, 40s, 20s and 60s.
Far fewer people aged over 70 or under 20 have been diagnosed with the coronavirus.
New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian addresses the media during a press conference to update on COVID-19, at NSW Parliament House in Sydney. Photo / Getty Images
Where authorities have been able to determine the source of the infection, three times as many cases came from overseas travel as local transmission. The US and Italy have now overtaken China as the most common source country.
The first case of COVID-19 was detected on January 25 in Victoria.
The patient was a man from Wuhan, Hubei province — where the Chinese virus emerged late last year — who flew to Melbourne from Guandong on January 19.
Three more cases were detected the same day in NSW.
All three were men who had recently returned from China — two had been in Wuhan and one had direct contact with a confirmed case from the virus epicentre.
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Since then, the number of cases has risen exponentially.
NSW quickly became ground zero for the Australian outbreak, and now makes up nearly half of all cases in the country.
Experts fear that if Australia follows the same trend as similar countries where infections have doubled around every six days, there could be as many as 6000 by early April.
