Summary
We’re going to wind things up for the evening. Here is what happened today:
- Victoria recorded 179 new cases, its lowest daily total since 13 July and the first day below 200 in five weeks. However, there were nine deaths, seven linked to aged care outbreaks
- The prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced an extra $171m for the aged care sector
- The disability royal commission heard eight people who access Australia’s national disability insurance scheme, and one worker, have died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. The federal and Victorian governments confirmed the creation of a $15m joint disability response centre
- Morrison said the government was not considering lifting the cap on international travel arrivals at the moment. More than 18,000 Australians are overseas trying to get home
- Victoria’s chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said most healthcare workers infected with Covid caught the virus while at work
- The aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, came under pressure at a Senate inquiry and was unable to recall how many people in aged care had died during the pandemic
- Anyone at federal parliament for the next sitting week, which starts Monday, has been advised to wear a mask.
And that’s it for now. Stay safe and see you next time.
Updated
The National Tertiary Education Union has blamed the raft of higher education job cuts on the federal government’s refusal to introduce a rescue package for the sector.
The union’s national president, Alison Barnes, said it was devastating to lose 355 jobs from RMIT University in Melbourne and the cuts came on top of the many hundreds of casual jobs that had already been slashed.
“The federal government is the author of the employment crisis in Australian universities,” she said.
“It has blithely refused to craft a rescue package as the sector confronts its worst ever crisis.
“It has also bent over backwards to exclude universities from jobkeeper.
“It is beyond reckless to allow universities to be smashed by this crisis, given the critical role they will play in the post-Covid recovery.”
RMIT cuts 355 jobs
Melbourne’s RMIT University will cut more than 350 jobs, the latest university to shed staff in the crisis-hit higher education sector.
A spokeswoman said the university had accepted 355 voluntary redundancy applications, which would save $48m. The university has a savings target of $200m.
“The disruptions created by Covid-19 are impacting RMIT, just like many other organisations around the world,” she said.
“RMIT has taken a careful and considered approach to addressing the financial challenges associated with Covid-19 and we are continuing to seek ways to reduce our costs and align our operations to the environment we face.”
The uni had taken steps early in the pandemic to tighten discretionary spending, freeze recruitment and external consultant spend, pause enterprise and capital projects, as well as seeking voluntary redundancies.
“We recognise that making these personal decisions is never easy and we are grateful to everyone for their contribution to the future of RMIT,” she said.
“We are committed to supporting our impacted people and will work with our leadership teams to manage workloads and prioritise our activities over the coming weeks and months.”
The university is facing a reduction in revenue of $175m in 2020 alone and looked to find savings of $200m heading into 2021. Depending upon the length of international travel restrictions, it expects to feel further effects in future years.
Updated
My colleague, Luke Henriques-Gomes, has been following the disability royal commission. He reports this from today’s hearing:
Eight people who access Australia’s national disability insurance scheme have died from Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.
The figure – the first time the total number of deaths among scheme participants has been reported by federal authorities – was revealed by the NDIS quality and safeguards commission on Friday.
“The commission has had eight deaths reported to us of participants passing away from Covid-19 whilst positive with Covid-19, and one worker,” Samantha Taylor, the NDIS commission registrar, told the hearing.
You can read the full story here:
Updated
Via AAP:
Children at Brisbane’s Youth Detention Centre could spend two weeks in lockdown after a staff member tested positive for Covid-19 in what may be the state’s first community transmission in a month.
Tests are continuing on staff and young people at the centre in Wacol after the 77-year-old Ipswich woman experienced mild symptoms and continued to work while infectious.
Queensland’s chief health officer, Dr Jeanette Young, said testing continued on the centre’s 127 young residents, who have been isolated in their rooms since Wednesday evening.
The facility’s 500 staff will also be checked, including those who were not on duty when the woman was infectious, from 8 August.
Health authorities want to know if the case is linked to an outbreak triggered by two Logan women who dodged quarantine after visiting Melbourne in June.
“At the moment I’m waiting for genomic sequencing on the virus the lady has ... and those young women who went down to Melbourne,” Young said on Friday.
The sunshine state recorded no new infections overnight, and has six active cases.
Young said a new historic case had been uncovered but was linked to a known cluster from early in the pandemic.
Updated
Via AAP:
The Northern Territory has reopened its borders to country NSW but Sydney and all Victoria remain hotspots.
The NT chief health officer, Hugh Heggie, revoked the hotspot designation on Port Stephens, north of Newcastle.
“People arriving to the NT from Port Stephens will not have to enter mandatory quarantine,” he said on Friday.
Anyone currently in mandatory Top End quarantine from the revoked hotspot would be released.
Victoria and 32 councils in greater Sydney remain on the NT’s hotspot list.
Travellers arriving in the NT from or through a declared hotspot must undertake 14 days of mandatory supervised quarantine at a cost of $2,500.
Updated
Masks advised for return of parliament
Federal parliament will return on Monday and everyone at Parliament House, including visitors, is being advised to wear a mask at all times in the public common areas and while in the presence of other people.
The House of Representatives speaker, Tony Smith, and the Senate president, Scott Ryan, have issued this statement for the sitting period from 24 August to 3 September:
“Over the last six months Australian Parliament House has applied multiple control measures to manage the increased risk of exposure to Covid-19.
“However, since the last sitting of the parliament in June, there has been a significant change in relation to the transmission of Covid-19 predominantly from overseas transmission to significant community transmission.
“Following further discussions with the office of the chief medical officer and the parliamentary departments, the following advice is provided for building occupants and those visiting Parliament House during the next sitting fortnight.
“While recognising that the wearing of masks is not mandatory in the ACT, at the specific request of the acting chief medical officer and out of an abundance of caution, in the public common areas of Australian Parliament House everyone is recommended to wear a mask at all times.
“As an additional precaution the wearing of masks is encouraged in the presence of others, especially where physical distancing is not possible, and by those at increased risk of Covid-19.
“If infected, the wearing of masks reduces the chance of unknowingly passing on Covid-19 to others, with masks also playing a role in protecting people who are not infected.”
Updated
Victoria has released its afternoon update. We heard the daily totals earlier: 179 new cases and nine deaths, seven of those linked to outbreaks in aged care facilities.
Of the total cases:
- 16,426 cases are from metropolitan Melbourne, 1,081 are from regional Victoria
- Total cases include 8,563 men and 9,260 women
- Active cases in healthcare workers: 668
- There are 1,732 active cases relating to aged care facilities
Active aged care outbreaks with the highest cumulative case numbers are as follows:
- 209 cases have been linked to Epping Gardens Aged Care in Epping
- 194 have been linked to St Basil’s Homes for the Aged in Fawkner
- 158 have been linked to Estia Aged Care Facility in Ardeer
- 152 have been linked to BaptCare Wyndham Lodge Community in Werribee
- 132 have been linked to Kirkbrae Presbyterian Homes in Kilsyth
- 113 have been linked to Outlook Gardens Aged Care Facility in Dandenong North
- 113 have been linked to Cumberland Manor Aged Care Facility in Sunshine North
- 112 have been linked to Twin Parks Aged Care in Reservoir
- 110 have been linked to Estia Aged Care Facility in Heidelberg
- 107 have been linked to Japara Goonawarra Aged Care Facility in Sunbury
There are 62 cases in residential disability accommodation, of which 13 are residents and 49 are staff.
Updated
The Victorian hotel quarantine inquiry heard from a security guard who worked across the Crowne Plaza and Pullman hotels between April and July.
The security guard, referred to by the inquiry as Security Guard 1, was a subcontractor for Nuforce, who put guards to work for Wilson Security.
The guard alleged between three and five companies were subcontracting to Wilson Security.
He also said he became aware of guards, nurses and DHHS staff working across multiple hotels, and was concerned it would lead to cross-contamination between the hotels.
“Considering how ridiculously communicable this virus is, I just thought that, you know, that was asking for trouble,” he said.
He alleged some guards he deemed “too casual” in their work ethic who were let go by one subcontractor at Crowne Plaza later turned up at the Pan Pacific, but he was unaware who had hired them, and indicated some guards might have been hired by subcontractors working for subcontractors.
Under questioning from counsel acting for Wilson Security, the security guard admitted he had no direct knowledge whether sub-subcontracting had been used for Crowne Plaza, and was not aware whether Nuforce had built into its contract with Wilson a ban on sub-subcontracting.
Updated
On that note I am going to hand over to m’esteemed colleague Lisa Cox who will take you through to the evening while I undertake my allotted hour of exercise.
Fellow Melburnians, we’ve hit the halfway point. Stay well and hang in there.
Updated
Daniel Andrews was in a better mood today, with the daily figures finally dipping below 200, and was making a lot of emphatic hand gestures.
Six weeks into lockdown in Melbourne, and three weeks into stage four, I’m reduced to tracking the follicles of public figures. I need to buy a puzzle.
Chief health officer Brett Sutton’s beard is coming along well.
Scott Morrison was also asked about the scheduled rise in the superannuation guarantee at that press conference earlier, and gave what AAP’s Canberra bureau chief, Paul Osborne, said was his “strongest signal yet” that the rise might not go ahead.
He writes:
The rate is set to rise from 9.5% to 10% in July next year, eventually rising to 12% in 2025.
Coalition MPs have been lobbying him not to allow the rise to go ahead, even though it has been legislated, arguing it is not good for business.
Morrison said on Friday the government had not made a decision but noted the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, had said allowing the rise to go ahead would be bad for employment.
“And it is the circumstances that have occurred since the election which has made that the case,” Morrison said, referring to the impact of coronavirus on the economy.
“Prior to the election it was certainly my view that those were legislated changes and increases and we had no plans to change any of those.
“Covid-19 has occurred, people’s jobs are at risk ... [and] that said, it is something the government has to carefully consider.”
However, he said the rise was not scheduled until July 2021 “so I don’t think there is any undue haste that is needed here to consider these issues”.
“I would certainly hope, and I am an optimist, that by May of next year that we are looking at a very different situation.”
Updated
The Woolworths supermarket at Melbourne’s Werribee Central was deep cleaned overnight because a staff member tested positive to Covid.
In an email sent to reward card shoppers, Woolworths said it was informed on Wednesday that the staff member had tested positive, and the deep clean happened on Thursday night. We were told about this by someone who shops at that store and is annoyed it wasn’t closed for cleaning sooner.
The staff member’s most recent shift at the store was on Saturday, from 6am to 11am.
Updated
Police in Victoria have fined 45 people for breaching curfew and 30 people for failing to wear a face covering in the past 24 hours.
Police say they issued 144 fines in total in the past 24 hours.
Among those fined are a group males who were stopped by police while driving from Werribee to Dandenong, and were allegedly going to visit friends; a man from Tarneit who was at Heidelberg railway station and did not provide police with a valid reason to be out; a woman from Port Phillip who was allegedly picking up a friend in North Melbourne to go to another friend’s house.
Updated
The last word from Morrison, before he called an end to that press conference:
We have got to keep managing this twin challenge of a health pandemic and a Covid recession. But I’ll tell you this: we are doing much better than most other developed countries in the world.
He said he would “rather be in Australia than any other country in the world”, which is one of those statements which is only newsworthy if he says the opposite.
Morrison then put our success on both fronts down to our optimism as a nation, rather than, for example, an abundance of mineral resources and also a big moat.
Updated
Guardian Australia’s Paul Karp asked whether the furloughing of the entire workforce at an aged care home, as happened at St Basil’s, was unforeseeable. Both Morrison and Kelly have said it was unprecedented.
Kelly said:
I think that’s getting into pedantics [sic] of words at the moment ... Certainly it was unprecedented. Could we have foreseen that? That’s another issue.
Because we are into pedantry here at Guardian Australia, I’ll say it’s getting into semantics.
Updated
Caps on international arrivals not on PM's to-do list at the moment
Morrison said he is not contemplating lifting the cap on international arrivals.
We will be reviewing those caps every fortnight; we will review them again a fortnight from now. Once the Victorian situation, and the NSW situation, I think, are even better than they are now, then we could have a look at those caps.
But right now on the balance of risks I think we need to keep the caps where they are.
Updated
ABC journalist Andrew Probyn asks Morrison why he said in July that furloughing all staff from the St Basil’s home for the aged was “unprecedented” when he had received advice from federal departments saying between 80% and 100% of staff may need to be furloughed.
Morrison said:
Well Andrew, um, I think it’s important to quote me in context. And what I was referring to there was the immediate and without notice full removal of a workforce. And that was not a scenario that was contemplated ... immediate, within hours, the whole workforce gone.
The acting chief medical officer, Prof Paul Kelly, said the speed with which all the staff were furloughed in St Basil’s and a few other aged care homes in Melbourne was unexpected.
That was an unprecedented event.
Updated
Morrison was asked whether Western Australia had got the balance right in its hard borders. He said that was a question for the WA premier.
He then referenced the ongoing legal battle of that state with former MP Clive Palmer, which he said are “unhelpful” and “unnecessarily distracting”.
Morrison was asked about aged care minister Richard Colbeck’s performance before the Senate inquiry this morning, and specifically that he could not recall how many people had died with Covid-19 in aged care settings.
Does the prime minister still have confidence in Colbeck?
Morrison:
I do have confidence.
He continued:
This is a very demanding environment in which to be working... people are working 24/7 on these issues, and ... as important as these figures are, 258 people have passed away ... I know those issues are not far from his mind on a minute-by-minute basis. I am sure the minister regrets not being able to bring those figures immediately to mind. On occasion I can’t bring figures to mind.
Updated
Questions now. First up, would the AHPPC’s definition on what a Covid-19 hot spot is be binding on state governments?
Morrison said:
I would say there is an issue of transparency, letting the sunshine in. If there is a clear definition of what a hot spot is and people are operating out of it then it would be odd, to say the least.
On state borders, Morrison said he welcomed Queensland’s announcement before the national cabinet meeting today that it was easing restrictions for people seeking to access health services, and also adding postcodes to the border zones.
He said NSW and Victoria have also “been able to come to other agreements”.
In two weeks, he said, they will get back together to develop an agricultural workers code for cross-border travel, similar to the freight code which was agreed to by national cabinet two weeks ago.
They also again referred the issue of what should be considered a Covid-19 hot spot to the Australian Health Principal Participation Committee (AHPPC).
Morrison said:
There needs to be a clear medical and scientific definition of what that is. These decisions cannot be made on an arbitrary basis – I am not saying they are, I’m just saying.
On the broader issue of state borders, he said:
Of course it’s necessary where they are put in place but there needs to be a careful balance later about the cost and impact of those borders ... weighed up against the health benefit.
Borders, though, are no substitute to testing, tracing, and outbreak containment. You can get outbreaks in states that have borders.
Take New Zealand.
You can pretty much say they had fairly secure borders when it comes to how they manage their borders ... Quarantine arrangements won’t always be perfect; they are human processes and they are subject to vulnerability.
Updated
On aged care and the need for a national program of establishing emergency response centres, Morrison said no other state or territory, other than Victoria, said it needed that support.
It was noted that there are existing arrangements within state and territories currently ... and there was no need at this point to move any of those other states and territories to the footing that we have in Victoria.
Morrison also announced an additional $171m in funding for aged care, which he said brought the total additional moneys on the aged care response to Covid-19 to $1bn.
That’s $103.4m extra for aged care preparedness measures, which includes “workforce measures” like paying for quarantine for interstate aged care staff, and a surge centre for call centre staff.
There’s also $50m for the aged care worker retention payment, $9m for the aged care regulator, and $9m more for the aged care emergency response hub in Victoria.
Updated
States will need to invest extra $40bn in infrastructure, says Morrison
Morrison says the biggest economic challenge faced by Australia at the moment, and for the next few years, “is unemployment. It’s jobs”.
With unemployment expected to be over 7% in the next two years, jobs. Is. The. Issue.
He said the Reserve Bank governor, Philip Lowe, and the treasury secretary, Steven Lowe, spoke about three main areas of economic support.
The first is government support through programs like jobkeeper and jobseeker, primarily funded by the federal government.
The second is investment in infrastructure and programs, which will primarily be state moneys.
The third is, basically, regulation and red tape.
Morrison said Lowe told national cabinet that states would need to increase their infrastructure investment “to the tune of 2% of GDP or $40bn over the next two years”.
The value of all current projects is $48bn, or 2.4% of GDP. The states will be asked to add $40bn worth of investment on top of that.
Updated
That hope is the low case numbers: NSW recorded just one new case today, Victoria recorded 179, its lowest in five weeks.
Morrison is giving quite a storybook introduction to this press conference.
And so, as we met for this national cabinet meeting, we could say that it was in an environment of increased hope.
Updated
Scott Morrison has begun speaking in Canberra
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, is speaking in Canberra now about the national cabinet meeting, in what he says is a “week of hope”.
Updated
A couple from Sydney have been fined $9,000 for allegedly sneaking across the Queensland border before being stopped by police.
They were travelling in a truck which was stopped by a police officer on the Bruce highway at Murrumba Downs, in Brisbane’s northern suburbs, at 1.30pm on Wednesday.
Queensland police said:
The 27-year-old male truck driver crossed the Queensland border at Coolangatta using a freight category border declaration pass. However, police allege a 21-year-old woman was also travelling in the vehicle without a declaration pass.
Both were issued with a $4,003 fine for failing to comply with Queensland’s Covid-19 border directions.
The man was fined an additional $1,305 for a series of vehicle infringements, including his truck being over length and allegedly failing to record information in a work diary.
Updated
Cheryl Axleby, the co-chair of the Change the Record coalition and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service, has criticised the Queensland government for keeping more than 100 children in youth detention in lockdown while it conducts coronavirus tests.
About 125 young people at Brisbane’s youth detention centre have been locked down since a detention worker tested positive to the virus yesterday. She had worked while symptomatic.
Axleby said:
Locking children up for days on end is no solution to Covid-19 and poses an unacceptable risk to the mental health and wellbeing of our kids. They shouldn’t be punished by being trapped in their cells without access to family, education or support. They should be protected from this potentially deadly disease.
We call on governments to act immediately and follow the lead of many countries around the world who have taken a public health response to Covid-19 and released low-risk and high vulnerability prisoners from prisons and youth detention centres to keep people safe both in prisons and in our community.
Updated
Prime minister to speak at 1.15pm
The prime minister, Scott Morrison, will give a press conference at 1.15pm about national cabinet. I expect he will also be asked about Richard Colbeck’s performance before the Senate committee.
Updated
Dan Andrews was asked when he thought stage four restrictions might end. He said he’ll be guided by the health advice.
I’ve been more willing to describe where we’re at in terms of trend. I think we’re in the same place. The line is coming down, moving in the right direction. However, it is just way too early for us to talk about what easing will look like, or even to be definitive about when that will be.
(Sadly the date of 13 September is indicative – stage four will run until at least 13 September unless we’re told otherwise. Certainty. Who needs it!)
Andrews continues:
That’s not designed to, in any way, dispirit people or take away sense of hope. We can be hopeful about these numbers. We can be positive about these numbers. But that can’t be accompanied by any sense of complacency.
He said the stay-at-home and social distancing rules were just as important now as they were when Victoria was recording more than 500 new cases a day, and added that the margin for error for bad behaviour was, arguably, lower.
Victoria is, basically, a dieter trying to lose the last 10kg. Except that, unlike a diet, this will hopefully work long term.
Updated
Andrews was asked about doctors from St Vincent’s hospital in Melbourne going on social media to call for interstate and overseas colleagues to come and help them out.
Andrews said he knew that hospital staff were under pressure, and he said the health department was working to ensure there was a “reserve workforce”.
There is pressure there, there’s no question. You can’t have this many staff furloughed, this many staff all positive, and you can’t have this bigger task, without there being some pressure.
He added:
We’re providing backup and support as best we can across the board. But there’s absolutely – you know, there’s no way of avoiding the fact that ... if you’ve got large numbers of staff furloughed, as we’ve seen at Northern, at Frankston, in lots of different places then that does put pressure there. That’s why we have to work closely with those hospitals.
He said that Victorian public hospitals had “significant support from other states, we’ve got significant support from the commonwealth government, we’ve got significant support from the private sector as well”.
Updated
Andrews apologised to the family of a woman who died with Covid-19, and whose son was first contacted by the health and human services department contact tracing team came a week after she died.
There’s no question it didn’t work as it should have. That’s why I want to apologise to the family, and I want to make it clear to them that we send our deepest sympathies to them. If anything that any of our officials have done have made this terribly painful time harder for them, I want to personally apologise.
By way of update, I can tell you that we are going to be reaching out to that family this afternoon, if that’s not already happened. I haven’t got a full briefing on exactly what has happened, but we’re going to be speaking with them. And if I can provide you with a further update tomorrow or Sunday, then of course I will.
Updated
Dan Andrews said:
I’m not committing to this; it’s what we’re working towards. Let’s try and have all those border towns ... with a proportionate set of rules.
All of our intelligence tells us there’s no cases there. There is a bubble. Maybe the bubble just needs to be a little bit bigger – move that South Australian border, in effect, further into Victoria – just a once-only, I should add. But I think we can. I think that there’s genuine goodwill.
And, look, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that Gladys or Steven or Peter [Gutwein] down in Tassie have done any of this out of anything other than they are fundamentally motivated to keep their community safe. And we’d make the same choice if we were in a different place.
So it’s not in any way a criticism. It’s just a genuine commitment and a plea from us – which has been answered – to work together to make these as workable as possible. I don’t think you’ll ever make closed borders easy, but we can make it a little easier in a number of areas. And they’re the sort of discussions that we’re having.
Updated
Andrews will talk to SA and NSW counterparts about border bubbles
Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, said there was a “productive” discussion in national cabinet on border restrictions today, and he would have further conversations with the NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, and the South Australian premier, Steven Marshall, about it today.
There are eight or nine communities that run down the South Australian border. We have one carved out, but ... we’re going to work towards doing the same thing for a number of other smaller communities who shop, get their fuel, all of those things, just over the South Australian border and to travel to a Victorian equivalent service provider is hundreds of kilometres as opposed to 20km, 30km, 40km.
I’ll be speaking with Steven later on today, and our officials are working together very, very closely. I understand why these borders are shut. It’s not a criticism of that. That’s a decision that’s been made. And, you know, if I were in their shoes, I would have probably made the same choice. But we’ve just got to try and make it as workable as we can. And the good thing is that there is real goodwill and a genuine interest in not undermining the public health imperative to not see the virus spread, but to be as sensible as we possibly can be. And, indeed, in some of these cases, to be as compassionate as we can be.
He said they were chasing up issues around agricultural workers accessing Goulburn Valley and Bendigo with the NSW government.
The ag worker permit arrangement is a big step forward, but we don’t want anything to detract from that. So we’ll keep talking with NSW. I’ll no doubt have a conversation with Gladys over the course of the weekend if there’s any other issues I need to raise.
But I’ll speak with Steven today. We agreed during the meeting that we’d have a chat about a couple of – often very small, but meaningful – border communities [for] who it’s a big impost if they’ve got to travel all the way back into Victoria, much deeper into Victoria than their normal pattern of movement, which is quite a short trip.
The bubble that they’ve drawn, I think, is a 40km line back across into our state. We could confirm for them that, in all the local government areas that run up and down the South Australian border, there are no coronavirus cases. So it’s just a matter of us connecting and hopefully being able to come to a commonsense agreement. Let’s have what needs to be there, there. But some of the other stuff that maybe is not proportionate to the risk and is making life really challenging for those border communities – let’s see if we can try and fix some of that up.
Updated
Prof Sutton said the daily death rate would “definitely drop in coming weeks”:
But we’ll still see deaths, knowing the cases that we’re seeing at the moment. But it is somewhat optimistic – I’ve seen in the numbers that about 60% of our cases are 60 years old or above. They are the most vulnerable group in terms of dying, so it’s important to see that, you know, we’re not seeing great numbers. I think our aged care cases – we’re getting on top of them in terms of the residents who are getting infected. And that’s really useful and important to protect them.
Updated
'Majority' of Covid-positive healthcare workers contracted virus at work
Sutton was asked about the data on how heathcare workers contracted the virus, which Andrews has repeatedly promised to release this week. It is not, it appears, being released today.
Sutton was asked if the data shows that 75% of healthcare workers contracted the virus at work. (Again, it hasn’t been released yet but this journalist may have a leak.)
He said:
We’ve still got the formal analysis and report to come through, that Safe Care Victoria and the Chief Medical Officer are doing. I think it will show the majority are coming from healthcare settings. What we need to dig more deeply into is exactly how those transmissions are occurring. There’ll be some that are from patient to staff, but there’ll be a number that are also between staff. And we need to actually address all of those transmission chains and all of the potential gaps and learnings that will come out of that report, because it’s not simply about addressing PPE, it’s not simply about addressing patient or staff flow. It’s about all of those systems issues that I tacked about.
You must be close to releasing that data?
Sutton:
It is pretty close. I would expect that by the end of the week, certainly.
Today is Friday, traditionally the end of the week, although it’s fair to say the Victorian government is now running a seven-day week. So ... Sunday?
Updated
New South Wales did more than 30,000 tests in the past 24-hours, Victoria just over 20,000. Should Victoria be aiming for those higher numbers?
Sutton says no, not necessarily – it will just drag out processing time.
I don’t know that you get extra value in 30,000 or 40,000 tests, necessarily. You push out the turnaround time – New South Wales would be pushing out their turnaround time as they stretch to 30,000-plus cases. And, when you’ve got a long turnaround time for your results, you’ve got people potentially who are infectious moving about in the community. So there is a balancing act to do there.
I think the main thing with our 20,000-plus tests every day is that people who are symptomatic are getting tested. That’s the primary thing.
Sutton said there is no “magic number” of daily case numbers that Victoria is trying to get to, other than zero.
We are looking to get to zero community transmission if it is at all feasible. And so that means that there are lots of caveats around what our numbers are.
It’s one thing to get to 10 cases but, if they’re all mystery cases, we don’t know where they’ve come from and we don’t know exactly where to focus our attention and energy in addressing them, that’s a trickier problem than an outbreak of 10 cases where they’re all known, where the chains of transmission are well-established.
So there isn’t a magic number, in that sense. I know people are looking for certainty, and certainly people are looking for some kind of assurance that we’ll get to the other side and there’ll be a lifting of restrictions. That will be the case.
The six-weeks of stage four restrictions will expire on 13 September. What number do we need to get to, to open up then?
Sutton said:
In terms of September 13, it is a long way away ... I’d love us to be below 50. I would be really gratified if it were in single figures. But I’m not convinced that it will be. I think it’s possible, but I think there are really significant challenges to get there. If we were in single figures, I’d be – you know, I’d be very, ah ... I’d be very relaxed.
Updated
Prof Brett Sutton: this is 'a challenging phase'
The Victorian chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, said he was also pleased to see a one in front of the new figures today, but warned that Victoria was “going into a challenging phase in the next couple of weeks”.
I guess every phase has been challenging, but the challenge of the next couple of weeks is that, even as community transmission goes down, those complex outbreak settings that are really hard to get on top of transmission, in the aged care disability sector, even in our health services – they might end up with a baseline level of transmission that is harder to shift.
I think it’s great that community cases will come down, our mystery cases will come down – that means that the opportunities for introducing infection into an aged care setting, a supported residential service, even in our acute healthcare settings – the caseload will be less, and so the potential for outbreaks will be less. But the ongoing challenge of managing within those settings will remain.
And so, even though we’re seeing numbers below 200 today, there might be a flattening off in the next couple of weeks if we don’t really focus all our attention on those complex settings.
Updated
Andrews thanked all Victorians for the role they played in getting the daily coronavirus numbers down below 100.
I’d simply say that, whilst tomorrow’s numbers will be for tomorrow, we are all pleased to see a ‘1’ in front of these additional case numbers, and to a certain extent it is perhaps at that level a little quicker than I thought it might be.
He added:
Of course, this Sunday marks the three weeks since the curfew was imposed. Next Wednesday marks three weeks since the most significant workplace restrictions came into effect. To be at this point shows that the strategy is working....
I want to thank each and after Victorian who is making a big contribution to this strategy working. I want to thank them and their families. I want to thank people from all backgrounds, from all parts of the state. No matter your perspective, this is a challenge that none of us are immune from. We’re all in this together. We say that a lot, but it’s true. It’s absolutely true. And because I think more and more Victorians are making the best choices and looking out foreach other, and therefore everybody, we are seeing these numbers come down.
But he said he was “naturally conservative”.
We’ll see what tomorrow holds. But there’s no room for complacency, there’s no way we can assume that this is over. It is an ultra-marathon, and we’re not halfway yet.
Victoria sets up a $15m joint disability response centre with the federal government
The Victorian and federal governments have set up a $15m joint disability response centre, which Andrews said is “essentially mirroring the arrangements we have in aged care”.
There are currently 62 active Covid-19 cases in disability care sectors, across 60 different sites.
He says the joint response centre is “all about making sure all the right people, all the most senior people, are at the same table each and every day, monitoring what’s going on in these settings, and making sure that we’ve got the most appropriate response, the most rapid response, to make sure that we protect vulnerable Victorians – but also staff”.
The funding will be split 50-50 between the state and federal governments. It will pay for a worker mobility reduction payment scheme, which will compensate workers who may be out of pocket because they are now only working at one site, rather than at multiple sites.
We’re grateful to them. That’s not easy. But with that payment, that’ll mean that we can support them to, in turn, keep their clients safe. We all know that, in that sector, that’s what they’re motivated to do – to provide the best care and support to their clients.
Again, I thank the prime minister and the federal government for their partnership. This is yet another example of us working together to deal with a common challenge. And it’s really important that, given the vulnerability of many people across these settings, it’s very, very important that we have a singular focus, and all the senior people around the table at the same time, and that funding to be able to limit the amount of workers who are going to multiple sites.
This is a very important step forward. And I’m deeply grateful to the prime minister for his partnership and agreement to essentially expand some of the arrangements that we’ve had in place already.
Updated
Andrews says the number of tests done each day is “back in a frame where we’re confident that we’ve got a good, solid picture”.
He urged anyone with symptoms to go to any of the 190 testing sites across the state, and says that’s the surest way to prevent the numbers from going up again.
Other key numbers:
There are 626 Victorians in hospital with Covid-19, of which 40 are in intensive care and 25 are on a ventilator.
Some 20,326 Covid-19 tests were conducted yesterday – that’s 2.05m tests since 1 January.
There are 668 active cases among healthcare workers.
1,732 active cases in aged care settings.
And a total of 4,421 active cases across the state. That’s another write-down – it’s 443 lower than yesterday.
In regional cases, 15 of the new cases are in regional areas, and there are 269 active cases in regional local government areas overall.
Andrews says:
Those numbers are falling and/or stable, and they relate principally to a number of larger outbreaks – once their 14-day period or whatever the equivalent finishes up being for them – we should see those numbers come down further.
I wouldn’t want that to have any sense of complacency in the minds of any regional Victorian. These numbers are low. They’re trending in the right direction. And that’s good. But please come forward and get tested if you have any symptoms whatsoever. And that remains the message right across the board.
Updated
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews is speaking now in Victoria
Daniel Andrews is giving details about the nine people who died overnight. Victoria has recorded 179 new cases of Covid-19 – that’s the lowest one-day increase in five weeks.
He says seven of the nine people who died in the past 24 hours were connected to aged care.
Those who died are a man in his 60s, a woman in her 70s, two women and two men in their 80s, two women in their 90s, and one man who was over 100.
Updated
The ABC has now been broadcasting the Senate select committee into Covid-19 for two hours – I think that might be a record, it’s highly unusual they would cut to a parliamentary committee for so long. And you can see why. It’s a trainwreck.
Aged care minister Richard Colbeck is still being grilled on why the federal government did not plan for the entire staff of a facility to be furloughed due to potential exposure to Covid-19.
He said, to Labor senator Murray Watt:
Senator, I’ve told you what we said. I’ve told you what our – what we believed. I’ve told you what we’ve seen. And I’ll repeat– we did not anticipate, at any point in time, that everybody who worked on the site of a facility would be declared close contacts and furloughed.
Watt said the federal government had “at least three separate warnings” that they might lose whole workforces.
On the 29th of June, your own department says that facilities might lose 80% to 100% of their workforce. But we’re really supposed to believe the prime minister when he gets up on the 29th of July and says: ‘Ohhhhh! None of us could have predicted this!’ There’s at least three separate warnings that this could happen. And it happens again.
Colbeck:
Senator, I’ve answered your question ... I do believe the prime minister, and I’ve answered your question as to the circumstances that led to that view, and I’ve expressed the same view myself.
Updated
Colbeck is being grilled on the issue of workforce shortages by Labor senator Murray Watt.
Watt asked him if it was “simply not true” that, as both Colbeck and prime minister Scott Morrison have said, they could not have anticipated having to furlough the entire staff of St Basil’s home for the aged in Fawkner last month.
Said Colbeck:
I disagree and I disagreed with the committee this morning because it was in a different context to anything we had seen before. And I said to you this morning that our contemplation was in respect. In St Basil’s, every single person on site including administration and back-office and catering and cleaning staff were all declared close contacts and that was not something we had contemplated.
In the Dorothy Henderson Lodge outbreak in Sydney in March, he said, only personal care workers were declared close contacts and furloughed.
He said the prime minister has known “since March” that in the event of an outbreak aged care home, there would be a severe depletion of the workforce.
We saw a circumstance where there was going to be a chance for the government to assist aged care providers early in March to supplement their workforce. We put measures in place early in March to do exactly that.
This is not going well for the minister.
Updated
Colbeck says federal government was prepared for 'worst case scenario' workforce shortages in aged care
The federal minister for aged care, Richard Colbeck, says he stands by a press release he issued in April saying that his government was prepared for the “worst case scenarios” of workforce shortages in aged care.
At the Covid-19 Senate committee hearing today, Colbeck said those comments were based on what the government “sincerely believed” at the time about how care staff would need to be replaced. Staff shortages have been more extensive than expected because they extended beyond care workers to the broader workforce, he said.
On 12 April, Colbeck issued a statement saying the federal government was ready to help the aged care sector fill staffing gaps during the coronavirus crisis. It announced measures such as the placement of new emergency response teams on standby for significant outbreaks in residential aged care facilities. The government also said aged care operators would have access to a surge workforce through the online platform Mable “to help providers if they’re unable to fill critical skills because of infection or staff have to self-isolate”.
Significantly, Colbeck said in that 12 April statement:
As unlikely as it might be, we have plans in place for worst-case scenarios where an outbreak in aged care facilities means local staff are unable to continue to provide care due to an infection in the service.
Asked today if he stood by that statement, Colbeck said: “Yes I do.”
How then did what occurred at St Basil’s take him by surprise, Labor chair Katy Gallagher asked.
Colbeck said the workforce issues at St Basil’s went beyond just care staff, and “off the back of that we have made moves to ensure that we have those capacities available in this circumstance where that might occur again”. He explained:
Our anticipation was the care workforce and that was the clear inference from my point of view in respect of the documentation that we put out. We did not anticipate that the entire management structure and the office structure, cleaning, catering staff would all be regarded as close contacts as part of an outbreak. … Based on our planning that is what we sincerely believed at the time.
Updated
In other news, mining magnate Clive Palmer has launched yet another legal claim against Western Australia and accused the government of “unconscionable conduct”.
More from AAP:
Palmer on Friday said his company Mineralogy had commenced fresh proceedings in the Federal Court.
He said Mineralogy’s almost $30 billion claim against the state would be amended to reflect additional damages it had suffered.
“The amount of damages is likely to exceed the damages claimed in the arbitration the state had previously agreed to but legislated to terminate,’” Palmer said in a statement.
“Under their unconstitutional act, we cannot take a dispute to any court. The simple fact is the state of Western Australia does not have the power to control either the Federal or the High Court of Australia.”
It has also emerged Palmer is suing WA Premier Mark McGowan for defamation, having filed paperwork in the NSW registry of the Federal Court.
WA’s parliament last week passed extraordinary legislation to amend a 2002 state agreement with Palmer’s Mineralogy company and terminate arbitration between the two parties.
The bill is designed to block Mr Palmer from claiming up to $30 billion in damages from the state.
Mr Palmer secured orders in the Queensland Supreme Court to have the arbitration awards formally registered shortly before the bill was signed into law.
He claimed this meant WA’s “draconian and disgraceful” legislation would now be invalid under the constitution.
The matter returned to the Supreme Court on Wednesday with the WA government arguing it was not notified about the action and the orders should be set aside.
Justice Glenn Martin adjourned the hearing until September 10.
Mr Palmer, through Mineralogy and International Minerals, is pursuing damages over a 2012 decision by the former Liberal government not to assess his proposed Balmoral South iron ore mine in the Pilbara.
The billionaire mining magnate is separately challenging WA’s hard border closures in the High Court.
But it was confirmed he had offered to withdraw the case if officials agreed to move the unrelated arbitration hearings from Perth to Canberra.
Updated
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has conducted 74 spot checks in Victoria and 41 in New South Wales, the Senate’s Covid-19 committee has been told.
Janet Anderson, the commissioner, was asked to give more details about the increased regulatory activities she flagged in her opening address.
We have commenced an infection control monitoring program specifically in the Victorian outbreak restricted zone and in parts of Sydney. We commenced it in early August as of 19 August we have undertaken 74 spot checks in Victoria and 41 spot checks in New South Wales. We will continue this program for as long as necessary.
We are sending in two-person teams, regulatory officials from the commission, and the purpose of these visits is to observe the use of personal protective equipment, to interview staff, to understand the way in which they practice hand hygiene, physical distancing, use of sanitiser and so on. As a result of these visits we have identified some services who will need some follow up from us. So it is an opportunity for regulatory action to flow from the visit. More recently we have also been having conversations with health services and they’ve indicated an interest in what we are doing and in working with us to amplify that role.
Back in Canberra, the aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, is struggling again. He is being grilled by Senator Katy Gallagher, the chair of the Senate select committee of Covid-19, about the workforce surge strategy.
There doesn’t appear to be one. Colbeck said it’s part of the “overall health response”.
“There is not a document,” Colbeck said.
Gallagher: “This is one of the most important things and all of you are saying you could not have foreseen what would happen with staff, yet on April 12 you told us you had done your worst-case scenario planning and had everything in order. And then the worst happens and you are telling me that there is not a workforce surge strategy? For the pandemic in aged care?”
Colbeck: “There are a series of contracts that were put in place and continue to build on as the demand for workforce has continued to grow within Victoria.”
Gallagher: “But that is reactionary. You are reacting. A Band-Aid here and a Band-Aid there. I am after the plan. What was your workforce strategy plan, knowing back in March that workforce shortage would be a major challenge in aged care? Because this fundamentally goes to the neglect of older Australians in these homes where they have been significant outbreaks. The workforce has gone and their care has been compromised. Seriously compromised.”
(There’s a brief interjection from Prof Brendan Murphy at this point, to remind Colbeck that aged care is part of the overall public health response.)
Colbeck: “This is also about a public health response and bringing together resources that are required. In our national Covid-19 plan that was released, [in] the first document released issues such as workforce are a key consideration and that is why things like the hospital agreement are so important because all of those things contribute to the capacity, our capacity to respond to the workforce needs of the pandemic.”
Gallagher: “You are the aged care minister and you are in charge of [aged] care. You want to keep people in their homes so surely you have a workforce strategy about supporting people to live in their homes?”
Colbeck: “Aged care forms part of the overall public health response, chair. And so all of those things are brought together to develop the overall national strategy plan for response to pandemic. It is a public health response.”
Gallagher: “So there is no specific workforce surge strategy for aged care? That you can point me to?”
Colbeck: “It is part of the overall health response.”
Updated
Meanwhile in Victoria, the hotel quarantine inquiry this morning heard from Sue and Ron Erasmus, returned travellers who stayed in the Stamford Plaza hotel from 1 May to 14 May.
Halfway through quarantine, Sue fractured her foot during an exercise break. The pair said it took around four hours for her to get eventually taken to St Vincent’s hospital.
The pair said PPE use was questionable, claiming gloves not being single use for staff working in the hotel quarantine program, and they said they could smell cigarette smoke coming from other floors, indicating ventilation was not good in the building.
“The possibility was there [that] we were pretty much sitting ducks, you know, we were just hoping that we would be OK,” Sue said.
Updated
Victoria was 'overwhelmed' by the second wave, says Prof Brendan Murphy
Back to the Covid-19 committee. Prof Brendan Murphy has been given free rein by Senator James Patterson to give his thoughts on Victoria’s response to the second wave outbreak and its contact tracing response.
He said that NSW succeeded in controlling the outbreak where Victoria did not because it had a decentralised public health system, a greater number of specialist physicians, and “really strong critical leadership from public health physicians”.
I think the most important lesson of all from the Victorian outbreak, for every jurisdiction around Australia, is to make sure they go back and check their public health response. This virus is incredibly infectious and unfortunately the Victorian public health response was unable to control the outbreaks in the way that NSW has done.
NSW has effectively stamped out an outbreak of a similar size to that in Victoria. At the time in May when we collectively as a nation agreed to open up, one of the conditions precedent that we were insistent on was we felt that each state and territory had the capacity to detect and contain and stamp out outbreaks. We knew we would get more outbreaks. We have seen them in NSW. They have controlled them.
I think Victoria did everything they could but this virus got the better of them and I think the challenge is that every state in the country needs to look now at the one thing that we can do to protect elderly Australians is to have not another outbreak of this magnitude... And I think every state and territory needs to go back and check to see they have all of those systems and processes to make sure they can do that. I do want to pay extraordinary credit to NSW who have had a very, very significant outbreak in the last few weeks and they have got on top of it and that is the model for the rest of the country.
Murphy said Victoria’s contact tracing system was “overwhelmed”. He said NSW had the best system in Australia.
NSW’s structure has had public health teams in every local health district led by senior physicians and they can have a local response to that. They have had a public health training system. There are many states and territories like Victoria that do not have as well-developed systems as NSW. NSW is the leader and I think it is very educational for the whole nation to look at NSW and how they have responded because I think every one of us needs to think that way.
Updated
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews will give a press conference at 12pm.
NSW records one new case of Covid-19
NSW has recorded one new case of Covid-19 overnight. It has 111 active cases.
The new case is a close contact of a previously reported case at Hornsby hospital. They went into isolation before the commencement of their infectious period, NSW Health said.
It also conducted 32,580 tests in the past 24 hours – which I think is close to a record for NSW.
NSW Health said:
While case numbers have remained low this week, the virus continues to circulate in the community and vigilance must be maintained. It is vital that high rates of testing continue in order to find the source of the cases still under investigation and to identify and stop further spread of the virus. NSW Health is urging anyone with even the mildest of symptoms – including runny nose, sore throat, cough, or loss of taste and smell – to come forward for testing. It is the best way to protect your family, friends and the wider community.
Updated
The federal aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, has apologised for the times when “we haven’t got it right” in managing outbreaks in aged care facilities while pushing back at assertions of systemic failures.
Colbeck was asked about issues with outbreaks in facilities such as St Basil’s and Epping Gardens, whether he was happy with how the system had responded in Victoria, and whether he had done enough to protect vulnerable Australians.
Chair, in some circumstances it hasn’t [been acceptable] as I’ve said and I have acknowledged and the prime minister has acknowledged, we haven’t got it right. We apologise for that. We are not happy that some things haven’t worked out as we might have hoped, or we have encountered circumstances that none of us had anticipated.
The loss of life had been “an absolute tragedy”, he said. When pressed on whether the system he was in charge of had failed to respond properly, he said the system had been “under extreme stress”.
And we have continued to apply additional resources to the sector and to the system in conjunction with the Victorian government to ensure that those in residential aged care have access to the appropriate level of care and hospitalisation where they need it.
So far, the Covid-19 committee has heard:
- That aged care minister Richard Colbeck became concerned about the impact of the Victorian outbreak on aged care residents in June, when there was an increase in community transmission;
- That when asked what specific things he did to respond in June, he named the aged care hub, which was set up in late July, and then said that what they were doing in June was “growing the capacity of our responders, clinical first responders that were going into facilities”.
- Asked for what he specifically did – because “growing capacity” could mean anything – Colbeck said they provided “updated advice” and were in weekly meetings with providers.
- Colbeck said the only way to stop the virus from getting in to aged care homes would be to stop the movement of people, and said that was “not a viable option to completely isolate residential aged care from the rest of the community”. He added “while ever there is community transmission the rate of that community transmission will reflect in the ingress into my workplace”.
- Asked by senator Katy Gallagher if he feels he’s done enough to protect vulnerable Australians, Colbeck said: “in some circumstances it hasn’t, as I’ve said, and I have acknowledged and the Prime Minister has acknowledged, we haven’t got it right. We apologise for. That we are not happy that some things haven’t worked out as we might have hoped”.
- He said they had “encountered circumstances none of us had anticipated”, which Gallagher said was “not entirely true”.
- Aged care providers have been promised “heat maps” of community transmission hotspots by the Victorian government but they have not always been delivered, according to Greens senator Rachel Siewert.
- Health department secretary, Prof Brendan Murphy, said aged care facilities could get that information by reading the publicly-posted information about the number of active cases in each local government areas, which is updated daily. (This list includes all active cases; it’s not necessarily an indication of community transmission.)
- Murphy said it was “completely unreasonable” for an aged care facility that has only had one positive case “to be in the public domain”. Siewert disagreed.
- Siewert asked why the retention bonus was not available to community home support workers, and health department deputy secretary Michael Lye said it was available to “frontline workers” only.
Aged care minister says suggestions the federal government was 'absent' in protecting residents against Covid-19 is 'offensive'
The federal minister for aged care, Richard Colbeck, has declared that the situation in Victoria remains “extremely fragile” and he has angrily hit back at claims the federal government has effectively been “absent” during the crisis.
During a heated exchange with the Labor senator Katy Gallagher at the Senate Covid-19 committee, Colbeck insisted that the government “has been there every single step of the way, providing every single resource it could muster in the interests of these people”.
The committee is focusing on the federal government’s role in preparing for and managing outbreaks in aged care homes. When pressed to accept responsibility for aged care, Colbeck repeatedly said:
We are the principal funders and regulators of age care Australia.
But he held to the government’s line that it was impossible to avoid outbreaks in aged care facilities when there was community transmission of Covid-19, and added that: “in combination with the states it is everybody’s responsibility to prevent the spread of the virus”.
Government officials told the hearing 258 care recipients have passed away to date, including 254 who were residential care recipients and four who were home care recipients. The current number of active cases in Victorian aged care settings is 1,811.
Colbeck pushed back strongly when Gallagher asked:
What more could have been done to prevent the scenes that we have seen in Victoria playing out on our night-time TV and in the lives of these vulnerable Australians? Why was the government, which is in charge of it, absent?
The minister replied:
I reject the assertion of the question, chair. In fact, I find it offensive. The government wasn’t absent. The government has been there every single step of the way, providing every single resource it could muster in the interests of these people. I think it is quite an offensive question or assertion that you make.
When Gallagher said she was “not making this up” and had been contacted by the families, Colbeck said he too had spoken with families. “We are all mortified by the circumstances that we have found in those facilities in Victoria,” he said. “It is a terrible circumstance.”
Colbeck said the situation in Victoria had stretched the resources of the entire health sector, with close to 2,000 residential aged care workers furloughed because of being either Covid-19 positive or close contacts.
The situation in Victoria remains extremely fragile.
Updated
The aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, is going to lengths to avoid saying first that the federal government has ultimate responsibility for aged care, and that it may bear any responsibility for the deaths.
On the former, he conceded under questioning from the committee chair, Labor Senator Katy Gallagher, that:
Well, it’s an obvious statement, chair. We are the principal funders and regulators of aged care in Australia. That is a simple fact. I’m accepting that. We are the principal funders and regulators of aged care in Australia.
On the latter, he firstly had to try to find the number of people who have died in aged care.
Colbeck:
I am looking for the report on my IT system ...
Gallagher:
It is not front of mind for you as minister for aged care? ... I’m just struggling to believe that you are not aware of these details?
Then, Colbeck said the government did take responsibility insofar as “all of us have to accept responsibility” for the Covid-19 outbreaks in Australia.
Asked to clarify “all of us”, he said:
I mean all of us in government and, in fact, those of us in the community who have assisted or participated in the spread of the virus. I mean, at the end of the day, we, as the governments, carry the can for the policy and implementation of the policy and in that context we accept responsibility.
Updated
Aged care regulator says it 'erred' in not telling federal health department about St Basil's outbreak
The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner, Janet Anderson, says the commission “erred” in not escalating information about a coronavirus outbreak at St Basil’s home for the aged in Melbourne to the federal health department.
Anderson said that since she last gave evidence before the committee, she had learned that the commission had received information on 10 July, via its telephone assessment contact, about a Covid-19 outbreak at the Fawkner home.
Anderson said:
Although the commission is not the first responder in a Covid-19 outbreak, and our understanding at the time was that the public health unit had been contacted, I recognise that we erred in not escalating this information to the commonwealth department of health at the time and we should have done better.
We have since reviewed our risk escalation procedures to ensure any evidence about an outbreak is immediately shared with the commonwealth department of health and the relevant public health unit. Our processes for sharing data and intelligence are now significantly enhanced and we are routinely sharing data daily with the department of health and the Victorian department of health and human services.
Our primary role as the aged care regulator is to hold providers to account for the quality and safety of care delivered to older Australians. In the context of the pandemic we are using the full range of our regulatory powers to ensure that providers are doing everything possible and necessary to protect those for whom they are providing care. The pandemic is ongoing and we are reflecting deeply on our practices and learning how we can improve ...
Since I last appeared before this committee, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has further extended our regulatory activities and I would welcome the opportunity to outline this additional work for the committee. The commission remains on duty, vigilant and focused on undertaking our important role.
As of Thursday, there are 193 Covid-19 cases linked to the outbreak at St Basil’s, and 31 residents have died.
Updated
Colbeck says that no country with Covid-19 has been able to avoid outbreaks in residential aged care.
Where there has been widespread community transmission, the reality is that we will continue to see outbreaks in all parts of our community but we see tragically the results that occur in residential aged care.
The susceptibility of older people to Covid-19 has been at the core of the government’s planning and response to the pandemic right from the start and has guided both the overall public health response and of course the implementation of specific measures. The potential impact on aged care has been at the heart of our thinking and planning in terms of preparedness, prevention and control right from the outset.
He says the federal government, together with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, has planned and prepared from the start of the outbreak, and continues to update planning documents. He says they are still engaging closely with the aged care sector to “share our learnings and to update our learnings”.
I acknowledged at the last hearing there were some things we hadn’t got right. We will continue to work – to be prepared to make sure that we are resourced as best we can and we continue to work particularly with the Victorian government to assist to bring this current outbreak under control, get community transmission under control. Because at the end of the day once we get the community transmission managed and dealt with every one in our residential aged care facilities will be safer.
Updated
The aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, is giving evidence before the Senate select committee on Covid-19 this morning.
He starts by offering his “sincerest condolences” to the older Australians who have died after contracting Covid-19, and says that “every death is an absolute tragedy”.
He also acknowledges the aged care workforce, saying it is an “extremely difficult time for them,” from personal carers down through to gardeners and cleaners.
Some of them are quite frightened but they continue to turn up to work every day in very difficult circumstances and I might say under some quite unfair scrutiny at times. And the circumstances that they are having to deal with are extremely confronting, so I just want to acknowledge the work that they are doing.
Updated
The federal agriculture minister, David Littleproud, is talking in Toowoomba about the hard border closures, which he says should be replaced with “commonsense” rules.
What we have seen from Covid-19 is that some of the arbitrary restrictions imposed on Australia by the states have had serious impacts.
I’m not asking the states to tear down those restrictions, I’m asking them to use common sense, engage with the agricultural sector, regional communities to understand the practical solutions that continue to help regional and rural Australia put food and fibre on your table but also look after their wellbeing.
This is where our federation will need to prove itself. We need our premiers today to come together to form the solutions that are going to help regional and rural Australia get through this. At the moment, we feel like the forgotten Australians, we feel as though the decisions that have been arbitrarily placed on us have been predicated for capital cities are not regional Australia.
There’s been good work done by some of the states but there are still some ways to go and we are seeing agricultural production supplies hindered by arbitrary decisions that do not use common sense, where we see animal welfare put at risk because of arbitrary decisions and human health put at risk for regional and rural Australians, it doesn’t make sense.
Littleproud says he hasn’t had a “direct conversation” with Scott Morrison about the issue, but he hopes the premiers and chief ministers can come up with a solution at national cabinet today.
He says that regional areas have a much smaller number of active cases – and in many cases no active cases – and that it should be possible to “create bubbles ... avenues of commerce for regional and rural Australians”.
I think they [existing border exemption zones] could be expanded and I think particularly between Victoria and New South Wales, there are some significant challenges there. It’s just going to take some more common sense than to say there’s an arbitrary line of 100km and if you are on either side, you want to move hay to your property on the other side, put it on a plane out of Melbourne, isolate it for 14 days in Sydney and send it your property New South Wales – that’s not common sense, that’s stupidity.
Updated
There are a few inquiries happening simultaneously this morning – I’ll try to keep you across the key points of each.
The inquiry into Victoria’s hotel quarantine system resumes at 10am, and you can watch it online here. Guardian reporter Josh Taylor will also be following it.
Witnesses today include three returned travellers and someone who was working in hotel quarantine as an “authorised officer”.
Also starting at 10am, the Senate select committee on Covid-19 will hear from the federal aged care minister, Richard Colbeck, as well as health department secretary Dr Brendan Murphy and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commissioner, Janet Anderson. You can watch that live here.
Today, we are all Elle Woods.
.@GuardianAus readers are the best. Thank you, Britt, this *is* the perfect gif for today! pic.twitter.com/fps5uFuX0X
— Calla Wahlquist (@callapilla) August 20, 2020
The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) has issued a statement ahead of the national cabinet meeting today, saying that access to essential health services must be maintained while the Queensland border is closed.
They said that many GPs and other specialists live in Queensland and cross into northern NSW for work. They said the wait time to be granted an exemption to the quarantine requirements and cross the border are “lengthy”.
The same issue applies at the NSW-managed NSW-Victorian border.
RACGP Queensland chairman, Dr Bruce Willett, said:
This is necessarily affecting the provision of health services to patients on both sides of the border, particularly in New South Wales.
We need to ensure patients have access to essential health services on either side of the border while these measures are in place to stop the spread of Covid-19.
He suggested that job-swapping arrangements should be facilitated.
In circumstances where essential services are not available, exemptions need to be provided to GPs and other healthcare workers to enable those services to continue. Exemptions that are necessary to allow essential health services to continue need to be provided in a timely fashion.
The process of reviewing applications for exemptions needs to be efficient, the last thing we want is patients missing out on essential care because they can’t access health services. Health workers’ applications should be expedited.
We have repeatedly been told not to put too much stock in one day’s numbers, so let’s do a bit of maths.
The seven-day average, as of today, is 238 new cases per day. That’s about one third lower than the seven-day average for last week, which was 367 new cases per day.
Everyone cross your fingers.
The absolute feeling of relief, I can’t tell you.
179! pic.twitter.com/Aq7vFY0Nwg
— James Hancock (@jameshancockABC) August 20, 2020
Victoria records 179 new Covid-19 cases, the lowest in five weeks.
Victoria has recorded 179 new cases of Covid-19 in the past 24-hours. That’s the smallest daily increase in five weeks.
The next lowest was 177 cases on 13 July.
Sadly, nine people have died.
But we have been waiting for those number to get below 200 for a long time. So, good news.
#Covid19VicData for 21 August 2020.
— VicGovDHHS (@VicGovDHHS) August 20, 2020
There are 179 new cases of #coronavirus (#COVID19) detected in Victoria in the last 24 hours, and an additional 9 deaths reported. We are sending condolences to their loved ones. More information will be available later today. pic.twitter.com/1oHSoNMqQd
More than 100 children in lockdown in youth detention over coronavirus infection
More than 100 children at a Brisbane youth detention centre remain in lockdown after a staff member tested positive to Covid-19, sparking fears they could be the state’s first community transmission case in a month.
More from AAP:
The 77-year-old supervisor at Brisbane’s Youth Detention Centre in Wacol had continued to work while infectious with Covid-19.
Health Minister Steven Miles said health authorities have tested 75 of the centre’s 127 young residents who have been isolated in their rooms since Wednesday evening.
“We have health staff monitoring their physical and mental wellbeing,” he told ABC radio on Friday.
The centre will not be taking new admissions and all face-to-face visits and court appearances have been cancelled.
Testing on the centre’s 500 staff is also expected to be completed later on Friday.
Miles said the infected worker, from Ipswich, was in a stable condition in hospital.
“I understand her symptoms were very mild,” he said.
The latest case comes after a virus scare was linked to a false positive result in south-east Queensland last month.
But Miles said the state’s chief health officer was confident the case was genuine as the woman had recorded two results positive for coronavirus.
Queensland health are conducting contact tracing to discover if the latest case has any connection to an outbreak last month linked to two Logan women who dodged quarantine after visiting Melbourne.
“That’s what we’re trying to get to the bottom of, if there is any unknown, community transmissions here,” he said.
The case was the only one recorded in Queensland on Thursday, with eight active infections.
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Cormann was also asked about the fact that Australian pensioners will not receive an automatic indexation increase next month because inflation has gone backwards. It’s the first time since 1997 that the pension hasn’t risen with indexation.
Labor says this means that the pension is “on hold” but Cormann said it’s actually an improvement in the relative position of pensioners. Here’s his logic:
Well, the cost of living has gone backwards but of course the pension will not go backwards so to the extent – that is an important first point.
Here, inflation = cost of living. You don’t need me to tell you that it’s often not that direct.
Cormann said the federal government had also provided pensioners with two coronavirus support payments of $250, and that any additional support the government may provide in the context of negative inflation “is going to be a matter to be determined in the context of the budget”.
I’m not going to speculate. Indexation arrangements are there to take account of the rising costs of living. Self-evidently if the cost of living goes backwards yet the pension remains the same, then that is an improvement in the relative position.
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Finance minister Mathias Cormann was on ABC News Breakfast a short time ago with a bit of forward sizzle about the national cabinet meeting, although that is probably too racy a term for the Western Australian senator’s delivery style.
On the issue of border closures, he said:
We want to ensure that the federal government, state governments work together cooperatively to resolve some of these practical issues that you have just mentioned.
We all understand the need to take effective action to protect people’s health and obviously the decisions that various state governments have made to impose state border closures are part of their measures to help project people’s health in their states.
But, you know, we do need to ensure that we are practical about these things and that where practical solutions can be put in place in a way that is Covid-safe, that should be done ... We just have to be practical and we are hopeful that in the meeting today, in the usual cooperative spirit of the National Cabinet, that some solution and some way forward will be able to be found.
Asked about the WA premier Mark McGowan’s suggestion that people deemed to be a flight risk in hotel quarantine could be made to wear ankle monitors (which is, frankly, terrifying), Cormann said:
I am not a commentator on state matters.
What about Australia’s international borders – will it be made easier for Australians still stuck overseas to come home?
Well, look, we are taking a very cautious approach to the Australian border arrangements.
We did urge Australians early on, quite strongly, to return if they wanted to return, and a lot of Australians did return at that time.
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More than 200 staff furloughed at Peninsula Health
The chief executive of Peninsula Health, Felicity Topp, says they are not currently experiencing a coronavirus outbreak at the Golf Road Links rehab facility.
They are, however, facing a significant outbreak at Frankston hospital. Some 211 staff have been furloughed, and 51 staff members have tested positive for the virus.
In a statement on Wednesday, Topp said they had “48 Covid-19 positive patients in our care, with none of these patients in ICU”. She does not say whether all of those patients were admitted to the hospital with the virus. A state government public health response team has been parachuted in to help manage the outbreak.
In another statement released late Thursday, Topp said there was a “misconception” that the Golf Road Links facility was also experiencing an outbreak. It said:
At the end of July, we did see an increase in cases at our Golf Links Road facility due to a patient initially returning two negative results, and then later a positive result. All appropriate infection control measures were immediately implemented including contact tracing and the furloughing of a significant number of staff at the time.
Currently our Golf Links Road facility is open to admissions and we are providing care to a large number of residential aged care patients, in an effort to help in Victoria’s aged care response to the pandemic.
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The chief executive of Wesfarmers, Rob Scott, has been on Radio National this morning talking about the issue of state border closures. He’s based in Perth, and is in the interesting position of both supporting the success of the border closure strategy there, and calling for state borders to be lifted because it affects the movement of freight.
He said that the tough approach taken by states like WA back in early April made sense at the start of the pandemic, but there “should not be a set and forget draconian approach”.
We are still trying to work our way through Covid and it made sense to take a tough approach to start with, but we need to learn to live with Covid and this is going to be the case for some time to come.
Scott said travel restrictions should be focused on areas “where there is the greatest risk and the greatest vulnerability”. This seems to mean remote Indigenous communities, and other regional communities with fewer health services and a high proportion of vulnerable residents.
He said:
I think in a way the state borders are somewhat arbitrary and what we need to be doing is thinking about it in a risk-management sort of way.
If there are strong hotel quarantine practices, swift contact tracing, and a lot of testing to shut down outbreaks, he says border restrictions can be loosened in a “Covid-safe way”. It is not a trade-off between tough rules and public health, he said.
Victoria was one of the states that had the toughest restrictions early on and notwithstanding those restrictions it had that flare-up ... we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it’s just about locking the borders down and that will keep us safe.
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While we’re on aged care, the families of those who died after contracting Covid-19 at St Basil’s in Fawkner have launched a class action against the aged care provider, alleging it breached its duty of care and failed its residents.
The writ was filed in the supreme court of Victoria on Thursday.
There have been 193 cases of Covid-19 linked to St Basil’s and 31 of its residents have died after testing positive.
Reporter Josh Taylor writes:
The writ alleges St Basil’s breached its duty of care in allegedly allowing staff or residents not to wear PPE, to rove freely within the centre when there was a risk of spreading Covid-19, allowing staff from other centres entry to St Basil’s without having self-isolated or provide an up-to-date vaccination against the flu, and failed to act in [resident] Fotadis’s best interests.
The writ alleges the centre was not compliant with legislation, regulations and professional standards, and failed to provide adequate and appropriately trained staff.
Read more here:
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Good morning,
State border issues will be at the top of the agenda in the national cabinet meeting today.
The agriculture minister, David Littleproud, has been leading the federal charge against tougher border rules, saying they restrict agriculture and life in regional border communities. He said:
What these city-centric decisions fail to acknowledge is that modern regional Australia has outgrown state lines, and that many regions share strong economic, social and community links across borders ...
The inability or unwillingness of our premiers to work with each other to find commonsense and practical solutions to restrictions that they have imposed is becoming a major test of their leadership.
Premiers must remember that they are not just premiers of capital cities.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews told reporters yesterday he would raise the issue at national cabinet today and advocate for Victorian border residents.
We’re doing everything we can to try and make the fact that others have closed their borders to us as workable as possible.
South Australia tightened its border rules from midnight last night, restricting travel among cross-border communities to those who are travelling to complete year 11 and 12 and agricultural and farming workers with properties within 40km of the border. Anyone else will have to re-apply for permission, including those seeking urgent medical or dental care, essential workers, or seeking to travel on compassionate grounds.
SA treasurer Rob Lucas told reporters yesterday:
There have been a number of cases in those western border communities and these decisions are not taken lightly ... We hope it’s a shorter period than a longer period.
Aged care and economic recovery will also be on the agenda. Reserve bank governor Philip Lowe and treasury secretary Steven Kennedy are among those expected to brief the group.
Let’s crack on. You can follow me on twitter at @callapilla or reach me at calla.wahlquist@theguardian.com
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