THE number of COVID-19 cases in the ACT has risen to seven, in what Chief Minister Andrew Barr described as a “good news day” at an 11.45am press conference at ACT Health in Phillip today.

But, he said, it was “one day at a time” and there was still a lot of testing to be done. He was briefing media on the third day of the ACT’s seven-day lockdown that began at 5pm on Thursday (August 12).

The new case, a rise of only one on the ACT total, is a close contact of a known individual, but ACT chief health officer Dr Kerryn Coleman would not be drawn on which one. None of the seven active cases are in hospital.

Dr Coleman said genomic sequencing had confirmed the initial covid case, a Gungahlin man in his 20s, came from Greater Sydney. She declined to provide any further detail, saying she was “increasingly concerned about putting blame in individuals”.

Mr Barr said the decision to lockdown “when we did was the right thing to do” and if the situation continued – high testing and low detection numbers – it would be the “very best public health response”.

Any decision on when the lockdown might end would be made closer to the end of the week.

He said there were 4500 covid tests conducted yesterday, a record number for the ACT. That represented about one per cent of the territory population and gave a good sense of what was going on.

The optimism of the ACT briefing came in the shadow of NSW’s worst Delta-variant day of 466 news cases reported this morning. At least 60 of the new cases were infectious in the community. At her media briefing,  Premier Gladys Berejiklian called the escalating situation in NSW “extremely concerning”. There were and four more deaths.

Yesterday Canberra’s sixth confirmed covid case was identified as a 14-year-old student at Gold Creek School, Gungahlin, who at the time had not been linked to the other five active cases. Dr Coleman said tests were incomplete and she still didn’t know where the virus had come from.