In NSW, caps on group bookings at restaurants and gatherings in outdoor public spaces will be upped to 30 people from this Friday, the state's premier Gladys Berejiklian announced in a presser via the ABC yesterday (Monday).

Venue bookings had previously been capped at 10 people and no more than 20 people could gather together outside.

"This is good news to allow people to prepare for Christmas and the celebrations over summer," Gladys said. "[But] we're not at the place where can allow mingling… so everybody has to be seated."

More good news: Gladys also announced that from December 1, the wedding guest limit will be lifted to 300 people, subject the 4-square-metre rule indoors and 2-square-metre rule outdoors. The wedding dancing rule, however, will stay the same: only the bridal party of up to 20 people will be allowed on the dance floor.

As for the 20-person limit on household gatherings, that'll remain the same. Along with the fact we still don't have much of an idea of when we can visit Queensland. Gladys said in her presser that she hoped there would be some change to the Sunshine State's "impossible" benchmark of when it'll open its borders. The state had said it'll let NSW residents in when the state had gone 28 consecutive days with no community-transmitted coronavirus cases.

"They're almost setting us up to fail and I hope that position changes in the next few weeks," she said. "I don't know anywhere on the planet where you've got at least 8 million people with open borders where you're going to be able to have zero cases of community transmission ... for 28 days."

No local cases of COVID-19 were recorded in NSW on Monday.

If your head is a little scrambled, make sure you pop over to WHO.int to get all of your official COVID-19 updates.

Written by Sangeeta Kocharekar, an American-born, Sydney-based writer at MTV. Photos from her pre-COVID-19 days as a travel writer are here.