Police will crack down on Delta virus riddled areas of south-west Sydney beginning at 7am on Friday morning after Premier Gladys Berejiklian pleaded with people to stop visiting the homes of friends and families.
Senior officers announced they would launch a major operation targeting three major council areas - Canterbury-Bankstown, Fairfield and Liverpool - amid troubling Covid transmission rates.
New South Wales reported its highest daily number of community transmission cases on Thursday at 38, with Ms Berejiklian indicating the state's lockdown could be extended even beyond next Friday.
More than 100 officers from throughout the city will join the operation, senior police said on Thursday afternoon - even suggesting that buying shoes from the shops could be deemed non-essential.
The area takes in some 110 suburbs, is home to more than 820,000 residents and represents a 519 square kilometre swathe of the city, with further hotspots announced in the zone overnight.
The escalating crisis has raised the question: could the area be cut off from the rest of the city just as the northern beaches was last December?
The danger zone: The NSW government has singled out three local government areas: Liverpool, Fairfield and Canterbury-Bankstown - as being sites for increased Covid transmission. Above, a graphic showing what it could look like if a localised lockdown came into force
Case numbers throughout the state have bounced around in recent days - peaking at 38 cases reported to the public on Thursday
University of Melbourne epidemiologist Professor Tony Blakely said area lockdowns can work and worthy of serious consideration.
But they aren't effective in all situations. 'It's damn hard to do without natural boundaries,' Prof. Blakely told Daily Mail Australia.
The northern beaches lockdown only worked so well because of the area's unique geography, he added.
Known as Sydney's 'insular peninsula', the northern beaches region was cut off from the rest of the city at the beginning of the 2020 summer holidays, stopping a 151-strong outbreak from spreading throughout the wider metropolitan area.
However the beaches peninsula can only be reached by a handful of roads and ferry services. Meanwhile, Daily Mail Australia counted more than 20 routes out of the south-west Sydney region.
'If you were doing it with military-like precision, you'd see road blocks and checking people coming in and out and if they had legitimate reasons,' Prof. Blakely said.
'You'd need to decide what legitimate reasons are for instance, transporting freight.'
Metropolitan Melbourne was surrounded by a 'ring of steel' during last year's city-wide lockdown (above), in order to protect regional Victoria
The M5 Motorway, one of the city's busiest, cuts directly through the Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool council areas
However, Raina McIntyre, the Professor of Global Biosecurity at the University of New South Wales, told ABC TV on Thursday that the Bondi cluster outbreak is too far gone for localised lockdowns.
'I think it's spread all over Sydney now, so I think it's probably too late to be looking at targeted geographic measures,' she said.
'If you're going to go harder, it has to be across the (wider) metropolitan area.
'The spread of it is so wide that I think it may not be enough to do a targeted increase (in restrictions).'
Government spokespeople say the two trends show how the Delta variant is spreading in the south-west.
Ms Berejiklian on Thursday urged residents not to visit family members at their homes. 'Please stop visiting people indoors outside your household,' she said.
'We're seeing households give it to each other - please stop that.'
Meanwhile NSW Police Assistant Commissioner Tony Cooke told Radio 2GB: 'We've got problems with young people (in these areas) who aren't necessarily being truthful in what they're doing.
'They're causing transmission here at a much greater rate than what previously occurred'.
NSW reported 38 new cases of Covid in the 24 hours to 8pm on Wednesday night, the highest daily case number since the outbreak began.
Forty patients are in now in the state's hospitals
