South Australia has recorded three COVID-19 deaths and 1363 new infections as Premier Steven Marshall says more health restrictions will be eased next week.

February 4, 2022

South Australia has reported three COVID-19 deaths as Premier Steven Marshall promises to ease more health restrictions to get people back to work.

A man and a woman aged in their 80s and a woman in her 70s died.

There were also 1363 new infections recorded on Friday, which was a decrease from the 1538 detected a day earlier.

The number of active cases has also fallen from 18,308 on Thursday to 17,199, with 228 people in hospital.

This includes 15 people in intensive care and five people on ventilators.

Of those hospitalised, 124 people are fully vaccinated, 36 are either unvaccinated or partially vaccinated, and 63 have an unknown vaccination status.

Mr Marshall said the falling case numbers would lead to more health restrictions being eased next week.

“We do want to prioritise those areas that are going to create employment opportunities for our state (and) get people back to work,” he said.

“So we are talking about the hospitality sector, the tourism sector, the fitness sector, they are the areas that are most hard hit.”

Caps on the number of people in homes will also be discussed but dancing restrictions are likely to stay.

The indoor face mask mandate is also set to remain into the future.

“I know this is annoying for many people but we know this is in many ways our best line of defence,” he said.

“(However) I think we can be confident that we will now continue to see our numbers reduce and that means we can reduce restrictions in the next four, six, eight weeks.”

Mr Marshall defended the delayed listing of two exposure sites by SA Health, saying, “you cannot determine if something is a high transmission site until there has been a high number of transmissions”.

Mr Marshall also said he was not concerned by the number of staff at school who had been forced to isolate, saying it was a large workforce and the numbers were proportionate to its size.

“We are very pleased with the return to school, extraordinarily high attendance, almost commensurate with non-COVID times,” he said.

“Yes, there are teachers and students who are going to be impacted but I think the settings we have put in place are going to minimise that.”

About 94 per cent of eligible South Australians aged 12 and over have received their first vaccine dose and about 91 per cent are double dosed.

Boosters have been given to 60 per cent of eligible people or about 42 per cent of South Australians aged 16 and over.