The COVID-19 case tally in the Illawarra and Shoalhaven stands at the same number it was a month ago, and fewer than 10 people in the region now have the disease.
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There have been 116 cases diagnosed in the region since the beginning of the pandemic - however this has dipped up and down a couple of times in that month due to a change in the region where the cases have been allocated.
On April 13 there were 116 cases recorded, but this dipped back to 113 days later when three people diagnosed were identified as living outside of the Illawarra Shoalhaven.
It took more than three weeks for this figure to get back up to 116, which was reached when a nurse at an Illawarra GP surgery was diagnosed with COVID-19 last week.
Now, 107 people in the region have recovered from the disease - leaving just nine people infected and one in intensive care at Wollongong hospital.
Since the pandemic began, a total of 53 people have been diagnosed in Wollongong, and there have been 32 in Shoalhaven, 22 in Shellharbour and seven in Kiama. All the Illawarra local government areas have had fewer than four cases which ave had an unknown source of infection.
Across the state, there has also been a significant lull in new case in recent days - with NSW Premier Galdys Berejiklian announcing no new cases in 24 hours for the first time since the pandemic began.
Despite the good news amid more than 6000 tests in the same 24 hours period, Ms Berejiklian has again warned NSW to not be complacent.
"That [figure] shouldn't give us a false sense of security or a false sense of complacency," she said.
NSW Health's Dr Jeremy McAnulty also stressed that people should come forward for testing with even the mildest symptoms, noting "the virus may be bubbling under the surface in the community".
This same message was discussed by ABC health expert Dr Norman Swan, in his Coronacast podcast yesterday, who warned that "it doesn't take very much to start a fire" and said continued testing was vital to detect people with mild symptoms.
"We've seen, if you like, a viral fire in the abattoir, the Cedar Abattoir, the meatworks in Victoria, we've seen a fire in the residential aged care centre in New South Wales," he said.
"And we will see more of these spot fires, if you like, in Australia.
"This virus can circulate in a community for maybe six weeks in a cohort of, say, young people who are not getting very many symptoms and are mixing with each other and then suddenly it breaks out because they go and visit their grandma or grandpa or they go to work and they spread it at work.
"And that's what happened in Seattle in Washington state and it has happened elsewhere as well.
"You just get low levels of the virus spreading within a community but it spreads quite quickly and then you don't notice it until people are affected and become symptomatic."
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