Higher School Certificate students face another blow to their morale after confirmation Queensland has cancelled Schoolies trips.
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Other states are also expected to ban the traditional end-of-school gatherings at coastal towns such as the Gold Coast and Byron Bay.
HSC students have had to deal with online learning, disrupted assessment tasks, uncertainty over how their university entrance marks will be affected and the recent cancellation of school formals.
Formals and Schoolies are both rites of passage for school leavers and offer a light at the end of the tunnel during months of stress and study.
Not this year.
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Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, whose borders are now closed to NSW residents, confirmed on Friday morning that Schoolies was off.
Ms Palaszczuk said Gold Coast officials agreed with the assessment of the state's chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, that the risk of spreading the coronavirus at Schoolies was too high.
"The chief health officer has deemed the event of Schoolies, as a mass event, over multiple days is high risk," she said.
"So the Schoolies that we have come to know over the years will not be able to go ahead in that form this year. This is a very tough decision ....
"So there will be, unfortunately, no concerts, no organised events, because there can be no mass gatherings."
The latest NSW Health surveillance report showed that almost half of NSW's locally acquired cases last week waited more than three days to get tested after they noticed symptoms.
"It's really important people get tested the day they get symptoms," NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said on Friday morning.
NSW reported 13 new coronavirus cases in the 24 hours to 8pm on Thursday, and chief health officer Dr Kerry Chant said she expected double-digit case numbers for several more days.
Ms Berejiklian said the state had come through winter "relatively well".
The 13 cases include one returned traveller in quarantine, six linked to a Sydney CBD cluster, four acquired locally from an unknown source and two close contacts of known cases.
The Hunter New England Health district did not record a positive test, the 22nd day in a row the area has been free of new COVID-19 cases.
Ms Berejiklian said most of the 20,000 to 30,000 people being tested every day were getting their test results within 24 hours and were not having to self-isolate for long.