Katherine's limited quarantine-free and home quarantine travel zone has been expanded at the eleventh hour to the whole Local Government Area after outcry from residents and local business owners.
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Health Minister Natasha Fyles announced on Tuesday that authorities had made the decision to expand the town's "green zone" so that a significant number of residents and tourism operators were not excluded from receiving interstate visitors.
"We will make some changes to the Katherine area for home quarantine. This is something that I know the residents of Katherine have had a number of questions around, it was quite a narrow area," she said.
"We'll be broadening that to the Katherine Local Government Area, which means people that are potentially stuck in Darwin can now transit through to Katherine at home quarantine there. So I know there's a number of residents that have been impacted by that."
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Ms Fyles also said COVID-19 is believed to have spread to a number of remote communities in the Big Rivers region, with mask mandates being put in place across the Territory.
One person has tested positive to COVID-19 in the Centre for National Resilience from the COVID cluster, while three "unconfirmed" positive cases had been detected in the remote communities of Timber Creek and Kalkarindji.
"These positive cases do need to be confirmed...but we believe because of the close contacts that they have had, that they're genuine cases...and we'll get that information back out early this afternoon," Ms Fyles said on Tuesday.
Mask mandates are now in place for the communities of Timber Creek, Kalkarindji, Beswick, Barunga, Katherine and Tennant Creek until Friday at 2pm.
"We do expect more cases in the coming days," Ms Fyles said.
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