Sydney New Year?s Eve fireworks: health experts call for caution as Omicron outbreak worsens

Experts are urging caution around Sydney's planned New Year's Eve celebrations amid surging Covid-19 cases in New South Wales.

On Friday, the NSW tourism minister, Stuart Ayres, said New Year's Eve fireworks would proceed as planned under the current public health order, despite the growing Omicron outbreak.

"Particularly for those family fireworks at nine o'clock, we really want to make sure that still goes ahead," Ayres said. "I do expect less people to attend. People are managing their own health, they're taking those precautionary measures."

The event is ticketed this year, with revellers encouraged not to travel into the city to watch the fireworks without a venue reservation or an entry ticket for one of 24 vantage points. Though attenders are encouraged to be double jabbed, vaccination is not mandatory.

On Monday epidemiologists called for precautionary measures to be implemented during the celebrations.

Chair in epidemiology at Deakin University, prof Catherine Bennett, said: "We now have such established community transmission that [New Year's Eve] probably will lift up case numbers."

Prof Robert Booy, an infectious diseases paediatrician at the University of Sydney, said spread on the night was likely, due to the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant.