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NSW has recorded 176 new local COVID-19 cases and two deaths while health authorities are encouraging parents to remain vigilant and monitor their kids for symptoms to prevent outbreaks in schools.
An unvaccinated women in her 40s died at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. She had underlying health conditions.
A fully-vaccinated man in his 80s who also had underlying health conditions Sydney died at Liverpool Hospital.
The state is inching closer to the 95 per cent mark for first-dose vaccinations, with 94.4 per cent of residents over 16 years stepping forward for at least one jab. Some 91.8 per cent are fully vaccinated.
NSW Health's Dr Jeremy McAnulty said there had been multiple cases in schools across the state.
"We are urging parents to remain really vigilant to help protect the rest of the school community," Dr McAnulty said on Sunday.
"Symptoms in children can be quite mild and not obvious so if they get any symptoms at all please take your children to a testing clinic."
Two Sydney schools and one in Newcastle remain closed due to COVID outbreaks.
Of the 12- to 15-year-old age group, 75.3 per cent are fully vaccinated and 81 per cent have received at least one vaccine.
The new cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Saturday were diagnosed from 55,330 tests.
Some 192 people are hospitalised with the virus and 32 are in intensive care, 15 of whom required ventilation.
At least 104 of Sunday's cases were in Sydney, while Hunter New England was the regional health district with the most new cases (32).
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There are warnings of more to come from the severe storms that have hit parts of northern NSW, delivering damaging winds and more heavy rain to saturated catchments.
A low pressure system from the Northern Territory was on track to deepen as it collided with a southern cold front, with severe storm warnings for an area stretching from west of Bourke to east of Inverell, and south of Scone expanded to include coastal areas just north of Newcastle on Saturday evening.
On Saturday night those storms reached the coast at Grafton.
They brought damaging winds and large hailstones as well as heavy rainfall.
Twenty millimetres of rain fell in an hour south of Grafton and at Port Macquarie on Saturday night.
Crawney Mountain, south of Tamworth, received 19mm in an hour, while gusts of 105km/h were recorded at Moree airport on Saturday.
There are severe weather warnings in place across the state, with heavy rainfall expected to develop over the Central West Slopes and Plains, the Hunter and the Mid North Coast during Sunday.
NSW has already experienced wet weather for much of the month with floods threatening around the state.
The Bureau of Meteorology's Jane Golding said on Friday the landscape is already "quite sensitive" and floods remain a risk.
"We've seen quite a lot of rain over the last 18 months ... the catchments are saturated, quite a lot of dams are full and some of our rivers are still quite high," she said.
Minor to moderate flooding is predicted on the Belubula and Bell rivers at Orange and Molong, while minor flooding is also set to impact parts of the Upper Macintyre, Gwydir, Peel, Castlereagh and Macquarie rivers.
A moderate to major flood warning is still active for the Lachlan River as its height continues to drop slowly after peaking centimetres below the major flood level on Thursday.
Residents in Forbes in the state's central west were evacuated and farmers in the surrounding areas are counting the cost of lost crops.
Releases from Wyangala Dam are likely to keep river heights up in Forbes but rain forecast for Sunday is not expected to raise levels further.
Ms Golding said the bureau expects the forecast "to evolve quite a bit" as the system develops over the weekend.
"Where the rain falls and the storms develop will depend on which track that (system) takes through NSW," she said.
Meanwhile, two boys were rescued from a flood-affected river in Condobolin on Saturday afternoon.
Emergency services were called after two 11-year-old boys jumped into the Lachlan River, which the bureau has warned could reach a moderate flood level by next weekend.
They were swept 60 metres away by the fast-moving current, made worse by the flood water level, police said.
They were rescued by a police officer who swam out to them with a flotation device.
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The Northern Territories' Chief Minister Michael Gunner is expected to provide more details about an outbreak of COVID-19 cases in two remote Indigenous communities after a further ten cases were identified.
On Saturday, it was announced five men and four women had been diagnosed in Binjari, about 330km south of Darwin, bring the current cluster to 31 cases.
A woman from Robinson River, 1000km southeast of Darwin, became the sixth person in her community to be diagnosed.
All are Indigenous Territorians aged between 17 and 78.
"This information has only just come in this evening and tracing and all other work is happening now," Chief Minister Michael Gunner said via social media on Saturday.
"Significant work will continue overnight, and we will provide more detail on all the cases and any new cases tomorrow".
The outbreak was triggered by a 21-year-old infected woman who illegally entered the NT in late October after contracting the virus in Victoria and lying on her border entry form.
Meanwhile, unvaccinated travellers will no longer be able to enter the NT from Monday, under sweeping changes to the territory's border rules.
The only exception will be essential personnel and Territorians returning from jurisdictions where COVID is not present, called green zones.
Fully vaccinated arrivals from red zones where the virus is present will be able to quarantine at home for seven days.
But they will need to have a rapid antigen test upon arrival in the NT and return a negative PCR test within 72 hours.
They must also get re-tested five, eight and 14 days after leaving quarantine and stay in a high vaccination zone away from aged care facilities and remote communities.
The home quarantine requirement is scheduled to end on December 20 with rapid antigen testing extended to all arrivals.
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The renewed search for the remains of missing three-year-old William Tyrrell could take months, with investigators on day six having scoured only a fraction of the scrub near where the pre-schooler disappeared.
As the end of the first week of the "high intensity" search draws near, police have searched an estimated 10 to 20 per cent of the areas of interest - or about one kilometre squared.
At that rate, the painstaking effort could take up to nine weeks to complete.
Police have so far combed bushland and drained a creek in an area a kilometre from the Kendall property where the boy's foster grandmother lived and where he was last seen seven years ago.
A hessian bag was found and collected for forensic testing on Saturday, with at least two other pieces of fabric placed in evidence bags and sent off earlier in the week.
Investigators have also scanned a concrete slab at the property, laid after the boy disappeared, but have since confirmed nothing of note was found.
Strike Force Rosann officers are testing theories William may have fallen from a balcony at the property, sifting through a garden below, and earlier this week seized a Mazda that previously belonged to the foster grandmother, who has since died.
It comes after police this week also charged the boy's former foster parents over an unrelated alleged assault on a different child.
The pair is due to face court at Hornsby on Tuesday.
The findings of a coronial inquest into William's disappearance, which concluded last year, are yet to be handed down.
A $1 million reward for information on the case still stands.
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