IN less dramatic times, a call for Novocastrians to stay away from Sydney "unless absolutely possible" would be taken as a humorous statement of the obvious.
After all, we already knew that nothing good ever came out of Sydney, except the sensible souls who shifted camp 160km north to get away from the madness.
Unfortunately, however, the warning coming from the Hunter New England Local Health District's public health physician David Durrheim is deadly serious.
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As Dr Durrheim says: "This virus, if you give it half a chance, can spread very, very rapidly and even from asymptomatic people in the pre-symptomatic stage."
Victoria remains the centre of national concern but numbers are also rising in NSW.
Outside of the state's main hot spots - Sydney's western and south-western suburbs and the Illawarra - two other places have active cases.
They are Newcastle, with two, and Katoomba, with four, according to the state government's COVID-19 "heat map".
The Newcastle cases are understood to be residents who had contact with a returned traveller who had undertaken the mandatory 14 days of self-isolation and tested negative, only to develop symptoms a few days later.
While this small chain of infection does not seem to have created a community transmission, it goes to show, once again, how contagious this virus can be, and how apparently substantial differences in the time it can take to manifest only add to the difficulties in detection.
As our front-page story today illustrates, Newcastle's Rundle Tailoring has swung into operation sewing washable cloth face masks.
Given the Victorian government's decision to mandate mask wearing in its hot spots, there will be pressure on the Berejiklian government to follow suit, should the virus make a similar return here.
The latest national figures show 275 new cases yesterday in Victoria and 20 in NSW.
In the past seven days, the Australian total has jumped by 1323, with only 40 of these having acquired the virus overseas.
A breakdown of Australia's 12,000-plus cases reinforces the early perception that this is a disease most heavily hitting the aged.
As the graphs reproduced here clearly show, coronavirus case numbers are dominated by the young, while the burden of mortality rates rises with the years.
As Dr Durrheim says, testing, hygiene and self-isolation are the only ways we have right now to control this virus.
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