National Cabinet this morning, with state and territory leaders have agreed to end COVID-19 stay-at-home orders for majority of positive NSW cases.  

The mandate will remain for those working in vulnerable settings including aged car and hospital employees.  

The changes will take full effect from Friday 14 October and also brings an end to pandemic leave payments for affected workers.  

It comes just a day after NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet called for the stay- at- home orders to be scrapped stating that it is time for Australians to take personal responsibility into their own hands.  

"We need to get to the point where we move away from public health orders," Premier Perrottet said.  

"It is always a balance between the public health, broader health issues like mental health, social wellbeing and economic and financial issues facing people across our state.".  

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, advises Australians that changes to the mandate "do not in any way suggest that the pandemic is finished".  

"We will almost certainly see future peaks of the virus into the future, as we have seen earlier this year". 

"However, at the moment, we have very low rates of both cases, hospitalisations, intensive care admissions, aged- care outbreaks and various other measures that we have been following very closely in our weekly open report," he said.  

Trend in recorded weekly cases for Australia as a whole as at 27 September. SOURCE: health.gov.au

New South Wales is currently seeing an average 1,827 new cases per day, an 18.9% drop on the previous week. The The number of hospitalised COVID-19 cases has also decreased by an average 12.2% compared to the previous week.

COVID-related deaths are also on the decline with the rolling seven day average number of deaths in NSW sitting at 10, down from a high of 43 deaths recorded on 22 January 2022.