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The Guardian - AU
The Guardian - AU
National
Michael McGowan and Calla Wahlquist

Royal Melbourne hospital confirms 12 staff have tested positive as Victoria records 317 new cases – as it happened

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What we learned: Thursday, 16 July.

That is where I will leave you tonight. Thanks as always for reading. Here’s what we learned today:

  • Victoria recorded 317 new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours, the highest daily total recorded by any state or territory since the pandemic began. Two men in their 80s also died, bringing Victoria’s total number of Covid-19 deaths to 29 and the national toll to 113.
  • A dozen staff from the Royal Melbourne hospital tested positive for Covid-19 and more than 150 healthcare workers across Victoria are in isolation as the state government came under fire for refusing to answer questions about hospital surge capacity or the number of medical institutions coping with outbreaks.
  • Monash University announced 277 job cuts amid a $350m revenue shortfall caused by the loss of international students during the pandemic. It comes a day after the University of NSW announced 493 job losses.
  • New South Wales recorded 10 new cases in the 24 hours to 8pm. Three of those were related to the Crossroads hotel, bringing the number of cases associated with that cluster to about 40. However, the NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, has insisted the state does not need to follow Victoria into lockdown.
  • One person in NSW appears to have become infectious only 24 hours after contracting the virus, something deputy chief medical officer Michael Kidd called “unusual” but not “implausible”.
  • Unemployment rose to 7.4%, up from 7.1%, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The number of unemployed people increased by 69,300 over the month, but the participation rate also increased as the economy started to reopen.
  • The federal government announced a $2bn job skills package, dubbed jobtrainer (of course it is). The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said the package would fund 340,000 training places from September to the end of June.
  • South Australia recorded its first new Covid-19 case in more than two weeks. The single case was a woman who underwent hotel quarantine in Victoria testing positive in Adelaide.

Updated

Victoria Police assistant commissioner Luke Cornelius has just held a press conference about that unfolding story in Gladstone Park. Police shot a man dead after arriving at a scene in which it’s alleged a woman was being attacked. She is now in a critical condition.

Cornelius said after receiving several calls, police arrived at the park shortly after 3:30pm, and found a man thought to be in his 30s “seriously assaulting an older female”.

Cornelius said the attack was described by officers as a “frenzied attack”, and that police fired shots within 30 seconds of arriving at the scene after the man ignored officers’ requests to stop assaulting the woman.

While authorities have been unable to identify the older woman due to the extent of her injuries, police believe the man and the woman are known to each other.

Cornelius said the man was known to police but had no criminal record, and that recent contact with him did not indicate “the events of today might have occurred”.

He said the officers who shot the man were “junior members early in their career”.

They found themselves having to make one of the worst possible decisions that any member has to make in their career, so my heart goes out to them.

We’re going to wrap our arms around those members and assure them of our support, assure them of our backing ... They’ve done the best to stop a terrible attack from continuing, and tragically, despite their best efforts, it has resulted in the death of a male, who we believe was the assailant, and also very very serious injuries to the female, who was the subject of that frenzied attack.

Policing is a very challenging profession. It calls all of our members to make difficult decisions in the most trying circumstances. Our members are called upon to act decisively. Our members are called upon to take action. And it’s apparent to me based on what I’ve been briefed about this afternoon that our members have done exactly what we expect of them.

Updated

Monash University announces 277 job cuts amid $350m revenue shortfall

Here’s the full statement from Monash University re those 277 job losses I told you about earlier. The University has confirmed the cuts come after an agreement with the NTEU for a temporary variation of the university’s enterprise agreement.

Monash University’s priority continues to be keeping the number of required job losses, due to effects of Covid-19, to a minimum, and of course maintaining the excellence of our research and education.

“Monash has made a temporary variation to our Enterprise Agreement (EA) with the support of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), the Monash branch union and our staff. This will help us save 190 jobs - it received overwhelming support, with 89.34 per cent of the eligible staff who participated voting yes, and was recently approved by the Fair Work Commission.

“Inclusions are; voluntary separation packages, an opt in five day leave purchase scheme, no bonuses paid for 2020, staff with excess leave balances over 30 days to take them and no pay increment increases until mid 2021.

“The senior management team has also taken a 20% pay cut.

“Job losses are an unfortunate result of the Covid-19 global health crisis across many industries. They will continue to be a reality without further government support in particular for research. At this stage, for Monash there will be a loss of 277 jobs by the end of year.

“Without the EA variation, this figure would have been 467.

“Monash is projecting a $350 million revenue shortfall for 2020 and has implemented a range of non-salary reductions to deal with this loss.

“Due to the impact of Covid-19 on university operations in semester one, 477 casual staff and 26 sessional staff were no longer required for the remainder of the semester. These staff will have priority where we require this work again in semester two.

“Monash has committed to use casuals and sessionals in 2021 at the same level as 2020 where the work is required in 2021. Forecast numbers for 2021 are yet to be determined until after our budgetary process takes shape and we have implemented the measures within the EA variation in 2020. We will know the outcomes of this in early October.”

Updated

The federal government says it is working to ensure families seeking extra help with childcare fees due to coronavirus-related financial hardship have their applications processed quickly.

We reported yesterday on concerns about the suitability of the “Additional Child Care Subsidy” scheme to respond to the needs of families struggling with childcare fees, which were reintroduced on Monday. Government figures show nearly a quarter of applications for this scheme took more than four weeks to process - and that was before the pandemic unleashed a wave of economic pain.

We asked the government whether it had any plans to reduce barriers to families accessing such help, or fast-tracking the decision-making process, in light of the current pandemic conditions when demand may be much higher.

An education department spokesperson tells us:

The government has implemented a streamlined approach to the application process for eligible families for the Additional Child Care Subsidy (ACCS) temporary financial hardship due to Covid reasons. Families are able to access information on who may be eligible and how to apply, including supporting documentation that might be required, on the Services Australia website.

The department continues to work closely with Services Australia to ensure ACCS temporary financial hardship claims are processed in a timely manner.”

More than 150 hospital staff in Melbourne are in isolation but the Victorian government has refused to say how many medical institutions are coping with outbreaks of Covid-19. My colleague Melissa Davey reports:

Updated

Here’s the Victoria police statement after officers shot dead a man in Gladstone Park this afternoon. I’ll try to keep you updated on this unfolding story throughout the evening.

A man had died following a police shooting in Gladstone Park this afternoon.

About 3.30pm police were called to parkland in Katrina Drive after reports of a man assaulting a woman. Upon police arrival, members have discharged their firearm resulting in the death of a male.

The woman is in a critical condition.

Homicide squad detectives will investigate the incident which will be over-sighted by Professional Standards Command, as per protocol when a police firearm is discharged.

Updated

Monash University to cut hundreds of jobs: reports

The Australian is reporting that Monash University will cut 277 jobs as a result of budget shortfalls caused by Covid-19.

Per reports, that cut comes after the university cut a deal with the National Tertiary Education Union over the past few weeks in order to save some positions.

The Oz is quoting a Monash spokesman saying the university is projecting a $350m revenue shortfall in 2020.

Job losses are an unfortunate result of the Covid-19 global health crisis across many industries,.

They will continue to be a reality without further government support, in particular for research. At this stage, for Monash there will be a loss of 277 jobs by the end of year. Without the EA variation, this figure would have been 467.

Monash is projecting a $350 million revenue shortfall for 2020 and has implemented a range of non-salary reductions to deal with this loss.

It comes just a day after another Group of Eight University, UNSW, announced 493 job cuts. The tertiary education sector has been savaged by the pandemic because one of its most important funding source, international students, has been cut off.

We’ve gone to Monash for comment.

Updated

Border Force commissioner denies lack of appropriate health measures in detention facilities.

Border Force commissioner Michael Outram has this afternoon issued a long statement defending the treatment of asylum seekers during the pandemic and denying they have been placed at increased risk of contracting the virus.

The safety and welfare of detainees, staff and the Australian community is my top priority.

Claims that immigration detention facilities, including Alternative Places of Detention (APODs), lack appropriate health and safety measures are false. I also reject claims detainees are being put at risk or that workplace health and safety laws are being breached.

However, he’s also outlined a number of incidents in which staff at detention facilities have contracted Covid-19. Border Force says:

  • A staff member based in Brisbane tested positive to Covid-19 on 18 March, but had not worked in a detention facility for 11 days before the diagnosis. There have been no further cases linked to the staff member.
  • One individual who has not been in a detention facility since April 2018, and who has been living in the community in Melbourne tested positive to Covid-19 on 6 July 2020. The individual is self-isolating in line with current community health advice.
  • A staff member based in Melbourne tested positive for Covid-19 on 8 July after developing symptoms on 7 July. They had not worked at any detention facility since 4 July and did not have any symptoms until several days after that shift. There have been no further cases linked to the staff member.
  • A number of staff employed at VIDC who had recently been to the Crossroads Hotel in Sydney are currently self-quarantining in line with NSW Health guidelines. All have tested negative for Covid-19 and none have displayed any Covid-19 symptoms.

Updated

Some breaking non-Covid news coming out of Victoria. This is still unfolding so we don’t have a lot of details as yet, but Ambulance Victoria says the woman is in a critical condition.

Updated

Bowen is asked about the Victorian government declining to offer information about hospital capacity in the state, or about the number of healthcare workers affected by Covid-19.

I’m aware the Victorian government, as have the other governments, have taken very substantial steps to prepare the health system for a potential second wave. In one sense that’s been time well spent in the preparation for the second wave. It’s been a considerable lifting of ICU capacity, which means Victoria is much better placed than it was in February or March to deal with a surge. The government has taken sensible steps to step back from elective surgery.

Governments are dealing with a very complicated situation [and] I’m sure governments will be providing as much information as they can and should appropriately do so.

Updated

The shadow health minister, Chris Bowen, is speaking on the ABC. He’s asked about the New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, suggesting she’s not interesting in following Victoria into a lockdown. Bowen declines to criticise her.

A different approach for different circumstances. What we’re dealing with in western Sydney in particular is different to Victoria. In Melbourne, there’s a widespread outbreak. It’s more at this point – and hopefully ongoing – more localised in Sydney.

If it gets bad enough I’m sure that will be contemplated. I supported, if you like, going harder earlier in the pandemic because I made the point an action you take early means that action can be in place for a shorter period of time and come off more quickly if you’ve taken the action soon enough. Having said that, we’ve got an outbreak in Sydney so far largely concentrated to one geographic location. I think everybody’s working hard to try and get that contained so that we don’t need to contemplate going back to a lockdown in Sydney. I’ve said consistently one of the worst things that could happen is if we open up and have to lock down again.

Updated

Upside down smiley face emoji.

Our major sporting codes, like every other industry in the entire world, have been struggling to continue operating in the midst of this pandemic. Yesterday the AFL announced it was relocating its Victorian teams to Queensland for at least 10 weeks and now the NRL is dealing with a curveball.

Five players and staff from the Wests Tigers have today been tested for Covid-19 because they live in the 19 postcodes in western Sydney declared “hotspots” by the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, earlier this week.

Tigers winger David Nofoaluma is among them. Nofoaluma lives in Campbelltown.

Coach Michael McGuire said the tests were “due diligence”.

I’m sure those sorts of things will happen continuously. We understand the world we are living in. We have to do the due diligence to make sure the game is safe and everybody is safe. Once we heard we had to do that, the boys jumped in the car to get the test. We have to do what is needed to get the game going.

Updated

If you were a member of parliament who was unhappy with the way FOI law in this country works, one thing you could do is change the way FOI law in this country works.

Updated

Kidd is asked whether aged care workers should be stopped from working at multiple facilities in Victoria given the outbreaks in a number of homes across the state. He says he understands that is “currently being considered by the authorities in Victoria”.

Clearly, each residential aged care facility has its own plan for dealing with the pandemic and for protecting the people under their care and I know that a number of the facilities are looking at ensuring that their workers are only working in one site at this time while we are in lockdown with serious community transmission, but whether there will be broader requirements I think is something we have to wait and hear from the colleagues in Victoria.

Updated

Kidd says one person in New South Wales appears to have become infectious only 24 hours after contracting the virus.

The advice from infectious disease experts at the AHPPC is that while this is unusual, it is not implausible. There is a wide distribution in the incubation period for Covid-19 and the time that people become and remain infectious. People usually develop symptoms within five to seven days of infection but may be infectious one or two days before the symptoms develop.

He says it is “unlikely the strain has changed”, and rather it is a matter of how it is “expressed in individual people”.

Kidd gives us some numbers:

  • There have now been 10,810 Covid-19 cases nationwide, including 330 in the past 24 hours
  • Only 3% of cases over the past seven days are overseas acquired
  • The national death toll now stands at 113
  • There are 114 people in hospital with Covid-19
  • Of those, 109 are in Victoria, 29 of those people are in intensive care units and 22 are on ventilators.
  • There were 66,000 tests carried out across the country yesterday, including 22,000 in Victoria

Updated

Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Michael Kidd, is now giving an update from Canberra.

Updated

Labor’s shadow minister for employment, Brendan O’Connor, says the opposition is “sceptical” about the government’s $2bn jobtrainer package.

We’ve seen the announcement today on the so-called jobtrainer program. Well Labor, of course, supports investment in skills, supports investment in training, but first we need to know couple of things. We want to know the detail about this investment. We know that this is a government that has taken $3bn out of vocational training and has reduced apprenticeships and traineeships by 140,000. We know there are fewer apprentices today than was the case at the beginning of the pandemic. We know that as well. And we know that not one dollar of this announcement goes into Tafe, the central provider of vocational training.

So we are sceptical about the government’s announcement. We are concerned that this is an attempt to keep people notionally off the unemployment queues, but not provide decent, accredited, qualified and significant training in areas of skills that of course are in demand. We are concerned that there’s not enough detail here but of course if it provides genuine investment in our people, in skills in the labour market, then of course Labor will support that. But we want to make sure it’s genuine.

Updated

Those new jobs figures today showed the highest unemployment rate is now in South Australia, where unemployment rose from 7.9% in May to 8.8% in June. That’s despite the number of jobs increasing by 11,400.

The SA minister for innovation and skills, David Pisoni, today called Covid-19 “the greatest economic challenge of our time”.

He said:

We are continuing to implement our strong plan to deal with the pandemic, as we look to get as many infrastructure projects as possible underway as quickly as possible, as well as deliver hip pocket relief through cheaper water bills.

Updated

Royal Melbourne hospital records 12 positive Covid-19 cases among staff

My colleague Melissa Davey has been bringing you updates about the situation for healthcare workers throughout Victoria during the day. She’s just confirmed that 12 staff from the Royal Melbourne hospital have returned positive Covid-19 tests. There are 70 staff from the hospital in quarantine.

Updated

Good afternoon and welcome to Guardian Australia’s ‘After Dark’ Covid-19 liveblog (sorry I know I made pretty much the same joke yesterday but it is funny to me).

Thanks as always to Calla Wahlquist for her excellent work today. There seems to be a lot of news around today. Maybe too much? Might be time for a little bit less news, universe. Anyway let’s do a quick recap of what’s happened so far today:

  • Victoria has recorded 317 new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours. It is the highest daily total recorded by any state or territory since the pandemic began. Two men in their 80s also died overnight, bringing Victoria’s total number of Covid-19 deaths to 29.
  • New South Wales recorded 10 new cases in the 24 hours to 8pm. Three of those were related to the Crossroads hotel, bringing the number of cases associated with that cluster to about 40. However the NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, has insisted the state does not need to follow Victoria into lockdown.
  • Unemployment rose to 7.4%, up from 7.1%, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The number of unemployed people increased by 69,300 over the month, but the participation rate also increased as the economy started to reopen.
  • The federal government announced a $2bn job skills package, dubbed jobtrainer (of course it is). The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said the package would fund 340,000 training places from September to the end of June.
  • More than 70 health workers from Monash Health in Victoria are in quarantine after potential exposure to Covid-19.

Updated

On that note, I’ll hand over to m’colleague Michael McGowan.

Remember to change your rego and licence to your current place of residence, and I’ll see you in the morning.

There seems to be some confusion around who, in Victoria, has the ability to release genomic testing data that can trace the origin of a coronavirus outbreak.

The chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, was asked during today’s press conference if there had been genomic testing of the public housing tower cluster, to determine the source.

He’d previously suggested – although this link hasn’t been firmed up – that it could be linked to the Al-Taqwa College outbreak, because there were some overlapping communities. News Corp reports – which Victorian health authorities said were incorrect – suggested it was linked to the Black Lives Matter protest.

Sutton said he couldn’t release the data because it belonged to the Doherty Institute.

The ABC’s coronavirus analyst, Casey Briggs, asked the Doherty Institute about it.

Updated

The four Victorians who stowed away on a freight train to Adelaide are being sent back to Victoria, after returning negative coronavirus tests.

More from AAP:

The police commissioner, Grant Stevens, says the four men will be back in Victoria late on Thursday.

The men spent Wednesday night in taxpayer-funded quarantine at the Pullman hotel in Adelaide’s CBD.

“It will be a relatively straightforward operation. They will be escorted from (the hotel) to the airport and we’ll ensure they get on the first plane out of town,” the commissioner said.

“It’s disappointing that people go to those lengths to sneak into SA.

“As much as we’re doing to stop people from sneaking in, the nature of our border is that people who are that motivated to do so may achieve that but we will do what we can to stop it.”

He said police will begin random checks of road freight, increase surveillance and search for passengers.

The premier, Steven Marshall, also weighed in, announcing harsher penalties for Victorians illegally entering SA.

From midnight on Saturday they will face a $1,000 fine if they fail to get tested for Covid-19 within 24 hours of arriving and again on day 12.

He said he shared South Australians’ outrage and disappointment that the court recorded no convictions for the stowaways who were placed on 12-month good behaviour bonds.

The maximum penalty for breaching Covid-19 restrictions in SA is $20,000 per individual and $75,000 for a body corporate.

“Most people in SA are concerned about the leniency and I share that outrage,” Marshall said.

“We are concerned about what’s happening in Victoria, which is why we have a hard border, and those people were breaching those rules.”

In court on Wednesday, Jacob Todd and Nicholas Batty, both 29, Alexander Moore, 22, and Sam Gledhill, 26, admitted to breaking the rules when they snuck into Adelaide.

The men boarded the train in Melbourne on Monday night, bound for Perth.

They were arrested on Tuesday after it arrived at the Adelaide Freight Terminal and spent a night in custody.

Updated

All emergency staff at Melbourne's St Vincent's hospital tested for Covid-19

The CEO of St Vincent’s hospital Melbourne emailed staff on Thursday to say the emergency department had undergone deep cleaning and all emergency staff were being tested after a potential exposure to Covid-19.

It’s the latest in a series of concerning outbreaks in hospitals affecting healthcare staff.

The email, seen by Guardian Australia, said 10 inpatients and 14 staff were recovering from the virus.

The email said that following “a small number of emergency department staff” contracting the virus, precautions were being taken. There had also been a potential exposure in the intensive care ward, the email said. Contact tracing was under way and some intensive care staff were now in isolation.

Updated

Oh, Canberra-based Victorians. I am glad you finally ticked at least this one thing off your life admin list.

I get it. I have lived in three states, but my licence has not. Forms, man. They’re annoying.

Western Australia records two new coronavirus cases

Western Australia has recorded two new cases of Covid-19 overnight, bringing the state’s total to 649. It currently has 27 active cases.

Both of the new cases are returned overseas travellers in hotel quarantine.

The WA health department said 809 people presented to coronavirus test clinics yesterday – compare that to almost 29,000 in Victoria. And they were not all tested – 771 were assessed and 761 received the test.

Updated

The coronial court in Victoria heard a directions hearing today for the inquest into the death of Indigenous woman Veronica Nelson, who died in custody on 2 January. She had been arrested on a charge of shoplifting and some outstanding warrants three days earlier.

While we talk about the Black Lives Matter rally in the context of new coronavirus clusters — which, again, didn’t come from there — it bears repeating that this is not a one-and-done issue for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. People keep dying in custody and inquests keep happening, even when it drops off the headlines.

The barrister representing her mother, Donna Nelson, read this statement to the court:

Veronica Nelson was a proud Gunditjmara, Dja Dja Wurrung, Wiradjuri and Yorta Yorta woman. She was a warrior and had a fighting spirit. Veronica was Donna Nelson’s eldest daughter and would have turned 38 years old this March that’s just gone.

Donna and Veronica were very close. Veronica was a very spiritual woman and liked to talk — and sometimes even lecture — people about her culture and ancestors. She was a very caring woman and like a second mother to her brothers, Duane and Russell.

If anyone ever needed a place to sleep, Veronica would be the first person to make up a bed on the floor and make sure that everyone had a good feed. Donna has very fond memories of Veronica and spent Christmas in Melbourne with Veronica a few days before she passed.

NSW Health has released a bit more information about the 10 new cases reported today.

Those cases were all reported in the 24 hours to 8pm last night. NSW currently has 89 active cases of coronavirus, and one person in intensive care.

As we mentioned earlier, four of the cases were in hotel quarantine, three were linked to the Crossroads hotel cluster, and the final three were still under investigation.

The cases under investigation are:

  • A woman in her 40s from western Sydney.
  • A woman in her 40s from south-western Sydney.
  • A man in his 30s from the Wollongong area.

All are currently isolating at home, and NSW health is working to determine the source of the infection and trace their close contacts.

Four more cases were reported after 8pm, so they’ll be in tomorrow’s total. They are all linked to the Crossroads hotel cluster, which is now linked to 40 cases.

Updated

Anti-virus activewear is not a thing, says RACGP

The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners has criticised a clothing company for releasing a line of activewear that was initially marketed as being “anti-virus”.

Athleisure company Lorna Jane has released a new range of activewear using “LJ Shield exclusive technology”, which it claimed “keeps you protected from viruses and germs”.

Triple J’s Hack program did a report on the project last night – you can see the original advertising material there.

This morning, the company has changed the language on its website to describe the product as anti-bacterial.

The RACGP president, Dr Harry Nespolon, has accused the company of exploiting consumer fears to sell leggings. In a statement, he said:

Active wear is great for the gym but it can’t protect you against viruses or bacteria. I suspect Lorna Jane are cynically trying to exploit fears concerning the Covid-19 pandemic to sell clothes.

If you spray their product onto any fabric and expect that it will act as a ‘shield of protection’ for you by breaking through the ‘membrane shell of any toxic diseases’ I have some bad news for you – this will not happen. The only thing that will be ‘terminated’ by the ‘shield particles’ is the money in your bank account.

Nespolon said marketing the product as anti-virus could “lull people into a false sense of security”.

He added:

The only precautions shown to protect against the Covid-19 virus include regularly washing your hands, keeping them away from your nose and mouth, socially distancing and wearing a mask where distancing is impractical. Please listen to the medical experts, not clothing companies.

We contacted Lorna Jane for comment earlier this morning, but have not heard back.

Updated

The Australian Council of Trade Unions says the increase in the unemployment rate means the Morrison government must extend the jobkeeper payment and adopt a jobs plan.

Morrison said he would extend income support in a way that’s “targeted and demand driven”, with details TBA.

Almost 1 million people in Australia are now unemployed, and 3 million are reliant on jobkeeper. The ACTU says many of them will fall into unemployment if the program ends, as planned, in 10 weeks.

The ACTU president, Michele O’Neil, said:

If the government follows through on cutting jobkeeper in September we will see a huge jump in unemployment. No one wants to see more people fall through the gaps, which is why we need to extend jobkeeper and deliver a comprehensive plan for a jobs-led reconstruction.

People need reassurance that Australia isn’t going over an economic cliff so the sooner the government tells people the plan the better for everyone.

We have 13 times more unemployed people than jobs available, and record rates of young people either out of work or needing more hours.

O’Neil said the jobtrainer program, announced today, restores some of the money that the Coalition previously cut from the training sector, but should be both extended and targeted at Tafe.

Updated

More than 70 health workers from Monash Health in quarantine

Seventy-seven staff at one health institution alone have been forced into precautionary quarantine after being exposed to the virus.

An email from the chief executive of Victoria’s largest public health service, Monash Health, said 77 staff across the service were in precautionary quarantine following three potential sources of exposure. Meanwhile infections have been found in five employees. Monash Health services one quarter of the state.

“We must use this opportunity to reinforce processes, to make sure that we all understand them, and are doing what we need to do to stay safe,” the email said, urging staff to use protective gear properly and undertake frequent infection risk assessments.

You can read more here.

If you were on the fence about wearing a face mask before and have now been scared into it by Victoria’s record-breaking daily coronavirus figures today, we’ve got you covered. Here’s all the current advice on when to wear a mask, and how to wear one.

More people in Melbourne are wearing facemasks when out and about. The government advice is to wear masks in situations when you cannot maintain physical distance — like on public transport — but it’s not mandatory
More people in Melbourne are wearing face masks when out and about. The government advice is to wear masks in situations where you cannot maintain physical distance – like on public transport – but it’s not mandatory. Photograph: James Ross/EPA

Updated

South Australia records one new case of coronavirus

South Australia has recorded one new case of coronavirus, with a woman who underwent hotel quarantine in Victoria testing positive in Adelaide.

According to AAP, the SA premier, Steven Marshall, said the woman spent two weeks in quarantine in Victoria where she returned two negative results for Covid-19.

She then tested positive upon her return to Adelaide.

Marshall says the result is a “low positive” and the woman is not considered contagious.

However, she will spend another two weeks in self-isolation.

Updated

Peak Aboriginal health body welcomes clarification on Black Lives Matter rally

The peak body for Aboriginal health organisations in Victoria says it welcomes the clarification from the Victorian health department that there is no link between the Black Lives Matter rally and the Covid-19 outbreak in public housing towers.

In a statement, the Victorian Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (VACCHO) says it is aware of six confirmed cases of Covid-19 among people who attended the rally on 6 June, but says there is no evidence to suggest those people acquired the virus at the rally or were infectious during the rally.

None of those six people live in a major public housing tower.

This is the DHHS statement:

The VACCHO chief executive, Jill Gallagher, said she welcomed the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services clarifying the matter.

We hope that this clarification provides a level of comfort for all those involved, particularly those still on the ground responding to the towers and those affected who still remain in lockdown and quarantine.

I personally hope these unfounded articles cease so we can get on with the job.

We remain deeply committed to working with government and our Aboriginal organisations to keep our families and communities safe as that’s our focus.

Like the general population, we are seeing a large spike in Covid-19 cases in Victorian Aboriginal communities and we mustn’t lose sight of what is at stake.

Updated

Victoria police says 1o police officers and protective services officers have tested positive to coronavirus, and all police are now recommended to wear face masks when they can’t maintain physical distancing, including in the station and in their patrol vehicles.

You might recall that I mentioned, a million years ago before 11am, that I was chasing up these details from the Victoria police media unit.

This is the response:

As of 16 July, 10 Victoria police officers and protective services officers have tested positive to coronavirus in total. Approximately 140 police officers and 30 protective services officers are currently in self-isolation after coming into close contact with other people who have tested positive.

The health and safety of the Victorian community, including every Victoria police employee, is always our number one priority.

In line with the Department of Health and Human Services recommendation, we have recommended staff wear face masks within controlled Victoria police workplaces where physical distancing cannot be maintained, including where no contact with the public occurs.

The face masks are supplied by Victoria police. To further help stop the spread of coronavirus, Victoria police has safety protocols in place in all work areas and employees are provided with health and safety advice.

Updated

In AFL news:

The Victorian government has refused to answer questions about hospital surge capacity or the number of healthcare workers and medical institutions coping with outbreaks of Covid-19, despite a concerning number of infections in critical health staff.

On Thursday, the state’s health minister, Jenny Mikakos, told reporters:

We have created more ICU capacity, more beds in our hospital system, and we have undertaken extensive training of our staff.

She said all metropolitan public hospitals would operate at 50% of elective surgery capacity, while private hospitals would remain at 75% capacity, to free up beds.

Guardian Australia revealed on Wednesday that six staff affiliated with Melbourne’s Royal Women’s hospital are among those confirmed to have Covid-19 as part of Victoria’s recent outbreak. The Age reported five healthcare workers from the Royal Children’s hospital, which treats some of Australia’s sickest children, now have the virus, and that seven other staff members who work in clinical and non-clinical roles are self-isolating.

Other outbreaks announced in recent weeks have occurred among paramedics, staff from the Alfred hospital in Melbourne, staff linked to the Northern hospital in Epping, staff and patients at Brunswick Private hospital, and at the Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s hospital. However, the state government has not provided updated figures associated with those clusters in almost one week.

Asked by Guardian Australia directly about the number of healthcare workers now infected and how many health institutions were involved, a spokeswoman for Mikakos did not respond. No direct response was given to a question about the current surge capacity in Victoria, that is, the ability of hospitals to rapidly mobilise staff to meet a sudden increased demand.

More details here:

Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, said further details about healthcare worker infections would be announced on Thursday afternoon. There are now 109 people in Victorian hospitals with the virus, 29 of which are in intensive care.

Updated

Finally, Morrison is asked if truck drivers should be banned from going to pubs and interacting with people because the outbreak at the Crossroads hotel in Sydney was linked to a person from Melbourne who worked at a freight company.

The person asking this question suggests the Melbourne man was a truck driver, and while that may be the case, they weren’t driving a truck when they visited the Crossroads. NSW health authorities have said they worked for a freight company, were in Sydney for work, and attended a function with work colleagues at the beleaguered pub on 3 July.

Morrison does not seem keen on banning truckies from going to the pub.

It’s the contact tracing that’s important, he says, not the job of the source. He said he’s sure the freight industry has been closely following the Crossroads case, and if they need to introduce new precautions, they will do so.

Updated

A question on China. Does Australia back statements from the US that China has no legal grounds to its claim in the South China Sea, and what will Australia do to enforce that position?

Morrison:

We played a constructive role in the South China Sea. We had observer status when the matter was being considered and we have continued to advocate very strongly for freedom of navigation through those waters ...

We back that up with our own actions and initiatives in our own statements. We will say it, and continue to adopt a very consistent position. It’s a matter that is frequently raised when we have dialogue with our colleagues ... and it is an issue of keen interest and one Australia has taken a keen interest in, but it does mean we have engaged respectfully and proactively [with China].

Updated

Morrison: 'Can’t mortgage off' economy for 'illusory' goal of elimination

Morrison is asked the suppression versus elimination question.

He says:

It’s always been an aggressive suppression strategy and that remains our view and it’s certainly the view of my government.

He says the economic impact of an elimination strategy is “far greater” than the economic impact seen to date in Australia – “you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of more people unemployed for a start, and other businesses closing and livelihoods destroyed”.

He also suggests harder lockdowns ... haven’t necessarily worked. (Before someone emails, I’ll add that Victoria lifted its stage three restrictions the first time around while there was still some level of community transmission, which you would not do if the goal was elimination.)

Morrison says:

In Victoria, they had the hardest lockdowns and theirs is the state that has succumbed to that outbreak, and the outbreak was initiated by a failure in hotel quarantine by returning Australians.

The idea that people wouldn’t be allowed to return to Australia or exporters can’t sell products overseas [if] we hold all shipping to Australia, that’s where the risk comes from. And the greater risk of an eradication strategy is ... all you need is one break and it rushes through community quickly because people become even more complacent, so it’s a very risky strategy and one that can be very illusory.

And it’s one that the AHPPC and chief medical officers have been consistent on and the discussions we had have been supportive of the approach and the states that have been most supportive of it particularly have been NSW and Victoria. That’s the path we are on. If you get to elimination as a result of this, well and good. If that’s the byproduct, well and good, but you can’t mortgage off your economy for what would prove to be an illusory goal by the process. That is the health advice I have and the economic advice.

Updated

Guardian Australia’s political editor, Katharine Murphy, has a question.

She asks:

You’ve said that the unemployment or employment numbers give cause for hope and picking up the analysis you just make about the recovery in the jobs market, do they underscore the importance of having income support which ties workers to jobs in the way jobkeeper does?

Morrison replies:

Income support, as I’ve said these months, they’ve been very necessary over the course of this Covid recession and they will continue to be necessary. And I’ve flagged now for months there would be a further phase of this but it will be targeted and demand driven and go to those most in need, and the treasurer and I will have more to say about that this week.

We have been putting further touches on the last few days to ensure the decisions we’ve made are as timely and targeted as possible.

One of the great challenges as we manage through this crisis is there are so many unknowns and uncertainties and have a very clear idea about what the world will look like in a few months from now is not an easy task but we believe we’ve been able to fine-tune those decisions well over recent weeks, taking into account the advice we’ve seen from the review and look forward to making those announcements next week.

Updated

Cash says just under 6% of all apprenticeships in Australia have been either suspended or cancelled during the pandemic. That’s about 16,000.

But that is why the wage subsidy, the support for apprentices and training wage subsidy was so important, because it is currently supporting around 80,000 of those apprentices – bearing in mind some will also be on jobkeeper.

Morrison said the jobtrainer package “works hand in glove with jobkeeper and jobseeker”, which is why they sound like a collectable set.

Updated

Cash said the jobtrainer package would fund 340,000 training places from September to the end of June.

That doesn’t just support those who have left the workforce through no fault of their own, but that also is supporting school leavers as well at the end of this year. It’s important for people if they want to take on new apprentices that they are able to hold their current apprentices, and that is the most urgent need as we speak right now.

Morrison is asked what job he would recommend to people leaving school in 2020. He says he will be working with state and territory governments about what their individual labour markets need.

He also added that the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was pushing the money for traineeships and apprenticeships in national cabinet. Got to get some of that magic DAndrews dust on you.

Morrison said:

In fact it was Premier Andrews very early on in the piece with the national cabinet, together with myself, who was really pushing this as an item that had to be firm on the agenda. So we are having very positive discussions with Victoria, but we appreciate they are having other challenges.

Updated

Morrison said Australia should not be locked down to stave off a coronavirus outbreak – but he conceded that, in Victoria, it’s a necessary response.

He said Victoria has suffered “a big setback” and the situation there was very concerning. But then he pointed to the tracing of contacts from the Crossroads hotel cluster in NSW where, he said, authorities had “moved incredibly quickly” to contain the outbreak.

That demonstrates in NSW how effectively the states can respond to this, and the best protection to live alongside the virus and to open up your economy – you don’t protect your economy by continually shutting things down.

That’s what you have to do when things get to the point they have in Victoria. But you can continue to move forward in the way that NSW is demonstrating by building that capability for tracing and testing and so on, and that’s been quite effective in this case, and hopefully we will see that situation continue to improve as well. But as we know, there are no guarantees. We are always in uncharted waters.

Updated

The employment minister, Michaelia Cash, said states and territories had agreed to sign a new heads of agreement setting out a process to “completely reform vocational education and training in Australia”.

That reform will take place over the next 12 months, she said.

You will be aware that the current funding arrangement is just not getting the outcomes that Australians and employers deserve. Under the agreement that Labor put in place, the commonwealth merely places $1.5bn into it each year. There is no line of sight, there is no transparency, there’s no KPIs.

There is also no commitment from the states themselves to actually have to put any funding in.So we are now going to work again cooperatively with the states and territories to put in place a new funding agreement that ensures that funding is directly linked to skills, relevance and ultimately jobs, because that’s what we are all about in the government – ensuring Australians are trained for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

Updated

Morrison finished with a call for optimism. Let me know if it worked on you.

He said:

We are very determined to look ahead and I would say to Australians, as difficult as these times are, let’s not look down, let’s look up, let’s lift our heads. Today’s employment figures shows there is hope. It shows we have done it before and we can do it again. We will continue to apply every resource we have available to ensure we get on top of the health situation with the virus in the foyer, and across the other states and territories.

That is our absolute commitment but equally, we need to ensure that we don’t allow setbacks. Australians are incredibly resilient and even as we go through these difficult times, let’s lift our heads and keep looking forward. Today’s announcement on these skills supports are about looking forward to the jobs into the future and to ensure Australians can make the choices they need to get into those jobs by getting the training they need right now.

Updated

The remaining $1.5bn is to extend the support for apprentices and trainees from small businesses to medium-sized businesses. That means it will be available to any business with 200 or fewer employees, and Morrison said the additional funding would provide a wage subsidy of up to $7,000 to an additional 180,000 apprentices.

On the $2bn announcement today, Morrison said the $500m in federal funding, to be matched by states and territories, would create places for people to get vocational and educational training in order to re-skill and re-enter the job market.

The funding is supposed to flow between now and the beginning of September.

He says:

It is sad and it is upsetting for many Australians that the industries and places where they’d been working, they will find it very difficult to find new employment in those sectors with those skills, potentially for some time.

And so we want to ensure they have the opportunity to make decisions. And be able to find employment in other sectors potentially so they can actually move forward with their own lives.

Updated

Morrison said the economic supports provided by the federal government through the pandemic has meant that “in Australia, while the blow has been harsh, compared to what’s been seen in most other developed economies around the world, we’ve been able to mitigate a lot of the blow”.

Updated

Morrison: July jobs figures 'will see impact from Victoria'

Morrison suggests that unemployment will increase this month as well.

In July, I expect we will see impact from Victoria but of what it has demonstrated in June is that as Australia has opened up again, as people have gone back into their businesses and opened their doors, as Australians have been endeavouring to live with this virus and to press on, we’ve seen Australians get back into work.

This has been a core objective of our approach over these past many months and it remains the focus of our approach together with managing the health situation in Victoria and other states as outbreaks and other challenges emerge.

He said the figures released today showed that 60% of the jobs “regained” were by women and 50% were for young people.

Underemployment has fallen and we’ve seen an improvement in hours. The majority of jobs obviously were part-time employment, not full-time employment. That’s to be expected in the economic situation that we’ve seen emerge over these many months but what I’m encouraged by about is that the flexibility we’ve seen in the labour force has meant that it’s been able to keep people in jobs, maybe not as many hours as they once had but they are still in jobs. And even better, the people working alongside them are still in a job because of those flexible arrangements in place for employers to keep more and more people on.

Updated

Scott Morrison is speaking in Canberra now. He says the Australian economy is “fighting back”, but also refers to the increase in the unemployment rate in those June figures released just half an hour ago.

Updated

Around 40 cases now connected to the Crossroads hotel cluster

The NSW chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, said around 40 cases are now connected to the Crossroads hotel cluster. She said more information about new cases this morning will allow authorities to clarify this number shortly.

Chant also said contact tracers would be seeking to re-interview some confirmed cases after initial questions about their whereabouts failed to give authorities enough information to link them to a known cluster.

I cannot stress the criticality of the current time.

Updated

Before we go to the prime minister, lets quickly return to NSW.

The chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, said health authorities were also warning anyone who was at the Hurricane Grill at Brighton-le-Sands on 11 July, between 6pm and 8pm, to be on alert for symptoms and get tested.

They are also tracing people who were on Jetstar flight JQ466 to Ballina on Sunday, 12 July.

Chant said:

The person was wearing a surgical mask and was self-isolating. But we’re doing contact tracing in relation to that Jetstar flight,

Updated

Speaking of jobtrainer, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, is due to give a press conference any minute now.

Updated

Andrews was asked about the unemployment figures in that press conference. He said Victoria would support any new money for Tafe, which includes the $2bn jobtrainer package, announced by the federal government today.

Andrews:

I’m not here to speak on behalf of the commonwealth government, but I said to you a number of times, I’m heartened by the fact my conversations with the prime minister are numerous, my conversations with Treasurer Frydenberg as well, hardship is going to continue to drive their policy settings.

That means wherever that hardship presents, be it in a given postcode, industry, business, family, in any part of the country, the support will be there to get people to the other side of this.

Updated

Unemployment up to 7.4% in June

While Victoria and New South Wales were providing the daily Covid updates, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has reported the unemployment number for June. A quick whip through the metrics.

The unemployment rate now stands at 7.4%, up from 7.1%.

The number of unemployed people increased by 69,300 over the month, but the participation rate increased as the economy started to reopen. Employment increased by 210,800 people between May and June. But compared with a year ago, there were 306,800 fewer people employed full time and 215,500 people employed part time.

Updated

Andrews was asked the question of the week, about his view on a suppression strategy versus an elimination strategy.

The journalist asking the question suggested Sutton was in favour of elimination – Andrews says that is not what he said. (He said he would be interested in looking at elimination but it’s not appropriate at this stage in the Victorian outbreak.)

Says Andrews:

If a suppression strategy can deliver an effective defeat of this thing, when we have eliminated it to a point we have zero cases, it’s a terrific by-product of delivering the current strategy. I said we’re essentially in the midst of trying to establish whether we can suppress and not have multiple waves. That’s the real time work we’re doing now. But you’ve got to order your thinking and order the work you do. And the most important thing at the moment is to have that sense of control, drive those numbers down, see community transmission at but a fraction of the rate it’s running now.

Does he think it’s possible to eliminate community transmission?

That’s absolutely our aim. That’s what the next five weeks are about.

On the possibility of stage four restrictions to achieve elimination, he adds:

The strategy is in there, it’s in place. We’re a long way, if I can put it to you this way, we’re a long way from debating what the end point is. We need to get within range of that before we start having any sort of discussions about whether the strategy needs to change. Ultimately, let’s get this stage three stay-at-home lockdown finished. Let’s see community transmission at a much, much lower rate, let’s see case numbers at a much lower rate, and then we can make decisions about what the next period looks like.

Updated

Sutton is asked what stage four restrictions might look like. He repeats his comment from yesterday, that it would be based on the epidemiology.

If an epidemiological review of the new cases found a large number had a common link that is not currently shut down and could be shut down, that could be the subject of further restrictions.

Could that involve making it mandatory to wear face masks, rather than just recommended?

Yes, he says.

I’ll keep the mask policy under review continuously if there’s other settings, other individuals or occupations where mandating mask use is more appropriate. That’s on the table, absolutely.

He adds:

All of the decisions around stage four, if we have to go there, will be based on the epidemiology. Seeing where ongoing transmission is occurring, even as stage three restrictions are in place. So again, I don’t want to pre-empt any possibilities. We really need to look at where the risk continues to persist in terms of transmission.

It may just be an issue of compliance.

Again, if it’s a compliance issue, of people working on site when they actually could be working remotely, that needs to be looked at as well.

Updated

Sutton says there has been some seeding of the virus between aged care facilities “because of staff who work across the facilities”.

He says there are policy guidelines in place to minimise that risk, but adds:

We know some wouldn’t be able to function if they didn’t have that flexibility in place. It’s a risk and we need to manage it as best we can.

Updated

Sutton was asked why we were seeing so many more outbreaks in aged care this time around – more than 30, according to the federal health minister, Greg Hunt. During the first peak, there were fewer outbreaks in aged care in Victoria.

He says:

We have got a bigger volume of community transmission that’s happening in Melbourne through this phase, compared to the first one. When there’s a lot of community transmission, then the workforce for aged care and for healthcare are exposed both in the community as well as potentially in those settings.

I think that’s what we’re seeing. We’re seeing staff members, especially in the higher transmission areas, being exposed to the virus. As we really ramp up the stay-at-home directions, we’re hoping their exposures are limited to the fullest extent possible. They still have to do that work. They’ll still be in close contact with those residents, but outside of the work setting, they need to minimise their exposure. Have someone else do the shopping, make sure they’re limiting their interactions with everyone else.

Updated

Victorian health authorities are currently monitoring 160 outbreaks, Sutton says.

We really have to go through two full incubation periods [an incubation period is 14 days] of no further cases to call it closed. There’s a lot that aren’t active, but they’re still on the books in terms of being called active.

Some of those outbreaks are quite small. Some, like Al-Taqwa College, are very large.

If we get one case in a staff member or a resident in an aged care facility, we call it an outbreak, because of the urgency of the response that’s required. Other outbreaks relate to transmission between individuals in a setting outside of a home.

Updated

Sutton: 'I expect that we can turn this around'

Brett Sutton was asked what he would say to Victorians who see the figure of 317 new cases in 24 hours and are terrified.

Victoria’s chief health officer said:

We have significant controls in place. We have the kind of restrictions that worked through our first wave. I expect them to work through this wave.

It’s somewhat more challenging, as I said yesterday, because of the family sizes, because of the networks of individuals who are connected to cases. But we also know the mobility data is telling us that people have significantly reduced their contacts and we know from following up our cases, that the number of nominated close contacts is much less than it was a week or two weeks ago. When it was five or six individuals, it’s heading down towards one. They’re all good signs.

I expect that we can turn this around. If it’s not turning around, I know we’ll do whatever is required to make it so.

Does that mean the outbreak is under control?

Yes, I think so. An out-of-control outbreak is one where no matter what you’re doing, you’re seeing an exponential increase. We’re seeing an increase, but it’s relatively slow.

The rate of increase that is being modelled, it’s also coming down close to one [so an R number of 1] where we expect that plateauing of cases. So they’re all good signs. I think they’re a measure we’re getting it under pretty significant control.

Updated

The major outbreaks in Victoria at the moment are:

  • 157 cases linked to Al-Taqwa College
  • Six cases linked to HWL Ebsworth law firm in Melbourne
  • 37 cases linked to Somerville Retail Services in Tottenham
  • 31 cases linked to Menarock Life aged care facility in Essendon
  • Five cases linked to St Basil’s Homes for the Aged in Fawkner
  • 23 cases linked to Glendale Aged Care in Werribee
  • 21 cases linked to Estia Health aged care in Camberwell
  • 29 cases linked to JBS abattoir in Brooklyn.

Updated

Victoria’s chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, has addressed arguments suggesting that the 29 deaths from coronavirus in Victoria are not that high, compared with a flu season. He says that’s “absurd”.

I’m still reading the counterfactuals that 29 deaths is not much compared to an average flu season.

These are the deaths you have when you have your controls in place. When you do not have your controls in place, and the restrictions that we have applied across metro Melbourne and Mitchell shire, and across the state to some degree, you get 1,000 cases a day, 10,000 or more cases a day, as has occurred in some countries, and you get up to 1,000 deaths per day, as has occurred in countries in Europe, in Brazil and elsewhere.

So the idea that 29 deaths is nothing, and that we can lift all restrictions and that we can let it run, is absurd. It’s an exponential growth in cases when there aren’t restrictions in place.

Updated

Victoria to pause category three elective surgery

Victoria will suspend elective surgery while the hospital system deals with the second coronavirus outbreak, Mikakos says.

Non-urgent elective surgery was paused nationally in March, for the same reason.

Mikakos said Victoria will pause category three elective surgery across the hospital system, and “our hospitals that were reaching close to 90% of normal activity will now pause at 75%”. Category one and two elective surgery will continue “as normal”.

Hospitals in Victoria were due to ramp up to 100% of normal activity by the end of July.

We think it’s necessary now to create additional capacity by bringing public hospitals down to 50% and private hospitals down to 75%.

There’s been a lot of discussion with the AMA and health sector unions about this and there’s support for this step at this time. This will mean that private hospitals can assist us with undertaking urgent surgery, so category one, category two surgeries, which [are] most serious surgery, will still be able to continue.

Updated

The health minister, Jenny Mikakos, says Victoria now has more than 1,000 intensive care and critical care beds. That follows a $1.9bn investment announced at the start of the pandemic.

Mikakos said the old Peter Mac hospital was also now available for use for surge capacity.

The old Peter Mac hospital was one of those projects ... This has been a $30m project to recommission 84 additional beds that are now available to our hospital system.

That will now be called St Vincent’s on the Park. Those beds will be managed by St Vincent’s Hospital, given the proximity to their main campus. And this will enable them to have patients move there, and to create more capacity to deal with coronavirus patients on their main campus, close to their emergency department and to their ICU beds.

She thanked the 650 construction workers “who worked over 60,000 hours to recommission the building”.

The building is now state of the art for a very old building, in terms of the space that’s now available for additional patient capacity.

But we’ve also worked across our health system to create more hospital capacity in many, many locations, from bringing forward and fast-tracking the commission of Casey hospital, at Baxter House in Geelong, at Bendigo hospital, Shepparton hospital, more ICU beds going in many locations across Victoria.

We have contingency plans, should it be required to exceed what we have already delivered, but we hope of course that capacity will never be required.

Updated

Andrews said he would provide some information about how prepared the hospital system was to cope with the outbreak.

But first:

... Can I send out a really clear message to every health worker, regardless of the role you play, whether you’re clinical staff, whether you’re a hospital cook, or cleaner, a nurse, a doctor, an ambo, someone working in a laboratory, we’re so grateful to you. And we’re so proud of your care and commitment, for every person you treat, every person in the system you’re part of, we’re deeply grateful to each of you.

We want to do everything we can to keep you and your family safe. We want to do everything we can to honour the work you do and make sure you’re supported with the technology, the equipment and the absolute resolve to make sure there’s everything necessary to provide the best care to anybody who needs it.

Updated

'Too early' to be moving to stage four, says Andrews

Andrews said Victoria will not be put into stage four restrictions today, saying it is “too early for us to be moving to a whole new stage”. But he said he won’t make any promises that he will not take that step if necessary.

Now, I know there’s been a lot of discussion, a lot written and said about possible stage four.

There are no announcements to be made about that today. That shouldn’t be read to mean there will be announcements made tomorrow. We plan for every single contingency.

It’s well too early for us to be moving to a whole new stage. This is in the hands of every single Victorian, though. If you want to make that less likely, you want to get out of these sort of restrictions as fast as as possible, then we all have to play our part and not rely on our doctors and nurses as the last line of ultimate defence against this virus, but instead acknowledge we’re the ones on the front line. Every individual, every family, every local community, the choices we all make absolutely determine how many people get this virus, how it spreads, and how long those restrictions will be in place for.

Updated

Andrews said 28,607 coronavirus tests were performed yesterday.

Can I thank those nearly 29,000 Victorians who came forward and got tested yesterday. It’s a massive and powerful contribution to our fight against the virus. You can’t contain this if you don’t know where it is and the most important thing for people to do, apart from of course following the rules, using common sense and good judgement, to come forward and get tested even if you have to most moderate and mildest of symptoms.

That gives us the data, the intelligence, the clear information that our coronavirus detectives can use to contain further outbreaks and to bring some stability to these numbers.

Just on those numbers, the number of active cases in the state is now 2,128. There are 4,750 cases since the pandemic began.

Andrews said that indicates “relative stability” in the numbers.

We have made the point with these stay-at-home restrictions only a week old, it will take some time to bring stability to the numbers and start to see a pattern where they are driven down.

Updated

Two more people have died of coronavirus in Victoria

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, says two men in their 80s died of the coronavirus overnight. It brings the total number of deaths in the state to 29.

Currently, there are 109 patients in hospital, 29 in intensive care.

Updated

Victoria records highest-ever daily total with 317 new cases

Victoria has recorded 317 new cases of coronavirus in 24 hours.

This is the highest daily total since 10 July, when Victoria recorded 288 cases in one day, and sets a new record for the highest daily total recorded by Victoria territory since the pandemic began.

In the peak of the first wave, on 28 March, the Australia-wide total was 469 cases reported in a single day.

Chant says two of the three new cases linked to the Crossroads outbreak are indirect links and one attended the hotel. They are:

  • A child of a previously known case
  • A man in his 30s, who is a contact with a previously known case
  • A man in his 80s who attended the Crossroads hotel on 5 July

Updated

On the cases that are still under investigation, Chant says:

Obviously, we are concerned, when we find cases that can’t be linked back, because it does indicate we have missed a chain. So we’ll be re-interviewing cases and trying to ascertain any contact points and updating the community about additional actions.

NSW records 10 new cases of coronavirus

Dr Kerry Chant says the 10 new cases were recorded in the 24 hours to 8pm.

Four of those cases were in hotel quarantine. Three were associated with the Crossroads hotel outbreak, and three more are still under investigation.

Updated

Just a reminder, we are expecting the Victorian and NSW coronavirus updates at 11am.

According to reports, the Victorian numbers are not good.

The Northern Territory has released a discussion paper on a treaty process with Aboriginal people, which will form the basis of the treaty commission’s consultations over the next few months.

The NT treaty commissioner, Prof Mick Dodson, said he was now looking forward to getting on the road to discuss the paper’s contents with Aboriginal Territorians.

He said:

I am seeking honest and constructive feedback on the discussion paper and I am particularly keen to hear about things you feel I may have missed out.

The NT government said a treaty would provide “a springboard for Aboriginal economic development and a process for truth telling” that will assist in resetting relationships.

The chief minister, Michael Gunner, said:

That’s what treaty is about. It’s not just a piece of paper. It’s not just symbolism. Treaty is a contract. It’s law. It acknowledges that our Aboriginal nations never ceded their sovereignty. It recognises the wrongs of the past to make a better future – in practical ways.

At Barunga in 2018, the Territory government and the NT’s four land councils signed an historic memorandum of understanding paving the way for consultations to begin.

The MoU was signed on the 30th anniversary of the presentation of the Barunga Statement to then prime minister Bob Hawke, who promised a treaty between the commonwealth and Australia’s Indigenous peoples, but did not deliver.

The treaty commission is due to deliver its final report in early 2022.

Updated

The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is speaking to reporters in Brisbane about the government’s $2bn jobtrainer package.

It’s important that we invest in skills, important that we invest in Tafe and training and apprentices, but it’s equally important that there are opportunities there for people to grasp, and if the government continues to make a hash of jobkeeper during the recession, if the government continues to fail to have a plan for good new jobs into the future, then clearly we’ll be selling people short.

We need a responsive training system. It needs to be well resourced. It needs to be well planned. And those things have been absent now for too long.

He said there are “a lot of unanswered questions” about the jobtrainer package and it remains to be seen whether it will work, whether it will be taken up by states and territories, and “whether it will make up for enough of the damage done by those cuts over the last seven years to Tafe and training”.

Updated

You might call it a meeting of the Five Eyes minus one.

A joint statement sent out by the office of the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, says Australia hosted a call today with the finance ministers of Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States (but not New Zealand).

You might recall that the Morrison government has been pushing for economic coordination among finance ministers from the countries that make up the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement.

The statement says today’s meeting was “the second of a series of regular calls among the countries to discuss the economic issues associated with Covid-19” and “unfortunately, New Zealand was unable to participate, but we look forward to their joining our next discussion”.

The statement – which was also in the name of the Canadian finance minister, Bill Morneau, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, and the US treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin – doesn’t contain a lot of detail about practical outcomes, but says the group “exchanged views on policies to protect jobs during the crisis and to get people back into work as quickly as possible as our economies begin to recover”.

Our governments have all taken unprecedented steps to restrict movement to slow the spread of the virus. The largest impacts of this have been on the jobs market. We have already seen the loss of hundreds of millions of jobs globally. A strong labour market is essential to our respective economic recoveries. We will continue to work together and share lessons to help ensure a strong and sustainable global recovery.

Updated

The deputy Labor leader, Richard Marles, has been on Sky News this morning ahead of the release of the June unemployment figures.

Whatever they show today, it is clear that the effective jobless rate is much higher. We’re going through a jobs crisis here.

Marles again urged the federal government not to withdraw the jobkeeper and increased jobseeker payments in September.

He said:

If you withdraw government support at a faster rate than the private sector is able to recover, then what you end up doing is engendering a further deepening of the recession.

The ABS will drop those unemployment figures at 11.30am.

Updated

The trade minister, Simon Birmingham, says Australia needs a strong investment relationship with the United States “now more than ever” as both countries try to recover from Covid-19.

A new report from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, released today, says businesses in both the US and Australia are looking to each other’s markets for stability and strength “in an increasingly fractious global economy”.

But the report was accompanied by polling showing just one in six Australians can correctly nominate the United States as the largest source of foreign investment, at a time when public debate has focused heavily on China’s economic reach and the bilateral trade dispute, as we reported this morning. The report also warns Australia is “exposed to collateral damage” from the Trump administration’s pursuit of bilateral deals such as the one between the US and China that included specific purchasing commitments.

Birmingham has welcomed the report, saying that “when it comes to investment, Australia has no stronger or more reliable partner than the United States”. And he linked the economic relationship to the coronavirus recovery.

Like any partnership there are challenges, but one thing is for sure, we need this investment relationship now more than ever, as both our economies begin the long road to recovery from Covid-19 and both our nations strive for long-term prosperity.

Updated

ACT reports no new coronavirus cases

The ACT has again recorded no new cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours.

There are still five active cases.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, and the health minister, Jenny Mikakos, are also holding a press conference at 11am.

Guys, you really need to coordinate this. Draw straws to see who gets 11am and who can slightly reschedule.

Updated

As always, you can follow our global coverage here.

Updated

Queensland reports no new cases

Queensland has recorded no new cases of coronavirus overnight.

As I mentioned earlier, all 19 Queenslanders who said they had visited the Crossroads hotel in south-west Sydney have now tested negative to the virus.

Updated

New South Wales will provide an update on its coronavirus numbers at 11am.

Updated

The Victorian police commissioner, Shane Patton, has told the Melbourne radio station 3AW that about 140 police offices are quarantining because they were exposed to the coronavirus.

I’ll try to bring you some more detail on this shortly.

Updated

Also, you may have noticed that the blue ticks have been kicked off Twitter. So it’s up to you good people to share the blog, because I’m getting twitchy.

Updated

Next time you get sent a panicked message from a friend about the possibility of stage four stay-at-home restrictions in Melbourne, you can send them this article by Melissa Davey.

Victoria’s premier, Daniel Andrews, has not ruled out the possibility of further restrictions, but he hasn’t said what that would look like or when it could happen. So it’s probably not worth worrying about at this stage.

Updated

Michael Kidd was also asked about an outbreak among staff members at the Royal Children’s hospital in Melbourne.

The hospital said in a statement last night that five of its staff members have separately tested positive to Covid-19 but that no inpatients have tested positive. The staff work across different work teams. Seven more staff members have been identified as close contacts and are self-isolating.

Kidd said he was waiting to hear further details, and he did not know “whether the source of infection has been out in the community or related to the hospital”.

Victoria was still in the first 14-day incubation period of the Melbourne-wide lockdown, he said, which meant that new infections were not unexpected:

What we are seeing is that the number of new infections is not rising dramatically. It’s still a very significant number of people being diagnosed each day, but it’s not rising dramatically.

We hope that we don’t see dramatic rises occurring — that we see over the coming week that the numbers start to decline.

We are also looking at the number of people who have been admitted to hospital, and particularly the number of people who are in intensive care units, indicating the severity of this disease, and of course we are gravely concerned about the number of residential aged care facilities where we have seen cases of Covid-19.

Kidd said under Australia’s suppression strategy further outbreaks of the virus were expected.

And whenever those outbreaks occur we moved in, we do extensive testing, we do very rigorous contact tracing, we isolate people who have been in contact with someone with Covid-19 and where necessary we bring in the additional physical measures and restrictions. This is the method we know works.

Updated

The deputy chief medical officer Michael Kidd has also just been on the ABC talking about the cluster in the Crossroads hotel, in Sydney, and outbreaks among hospital workers in Melbourne.

He said NSW authorities were responding “very vigorously” to the Crossroads outbreak and that the true size of the cluster – which now sits at 34 direct and indirect cases – depended on the behaviour of the individuals exposed.

It depends on individuals’ behaviour and on the number of people that an infected person has come into close contact with. It depends on whether people have been maintaining the physical distancing which we continue to recommend for everybody and the hand hygiene and the other measures. Most importantly, though, anybody who was at that hotel, the slightest symptoms, they must arrange to be tested.

He said he was not sure if the Covidsafe app was used in tracing contacts for the Crossroads hotel – NSW authorities have not mentioned using the app – but that in Victoria “many contacts” have been identified through the app.

That’s not what the chief health officer of Victoria, Prof Brett Sutton, says. He told reporters yesterday that the app hasn’t helped identify any new contacts in Victoria.

Updated

While we’re on Queensland, this is the border queue this morning.

On the eternal question of suppression versus elimination, Annastacia Palaszczuk says:

Look, the national cabinet has supported suppression. I think what you have seen around Australia, though, is that the majority of the states and territories were actually at an almost elimination stage and that means no community transmission happening in their state or territory.

We were of the very firm view in Queensland that New SouthWales and Victoria had to get their community transmission under control. New South Wales did that and to a large extent Victoria was on that path as well. But, of course, we are always going to be subject to outbreaks as long as this virus is circulating in the world and as long as we still have people returning home from overseas countries, there could be an outbreak in a hotel that gets into the community that no one knows about.

That’s why these strict quarantine measures are now in place across the country with hotels, but that’s not to say that there aren’t other people out there circulating in the community that have the virus. We are learning more and more about this virus, you know, each and every day. So I think it’s really important that the national cabinet keeps on top of this issue and, look, we do wish Victoria and New South Wales all the very best and we know that could happen — it could happen in any other state or territory as well. So we always have to be on our guard.

Interpret that as you will.

Updated

Queensland should host AFL grand final, Annastacia Palaszczuk says

The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, was on ABC News Breakfast earlier talking about the deal to bring all Victorian AFL teams to the Sunshine state.

She says she’s just “happy to help out”. And that help extends to hosting the grand final, which means the bid to host the Grannie is now a five-way contest between Queensland, NSW, Western Australia, South Australia and Victoria, which is not yet ready to contemplate the possibility of having the AFL grand final held anywhere but the MCG.

Palaszczuk told the ABC:

I said to Gill [McLachlan, chief executive of the AFL], if we are doing the heavy lifting we would like to be considered for a grand final. I think that’s only fair. But, of course, it’s going to depend on what’s happening in the other states during that time and we will enter those negotiations seriously. We firmly believe that Queensland could host it here.

She was asked if hosting the AFL means that Queensland has to keep its borders closed for longer than it maybe otherwise would, because it is holding itself up as a safe place for sport to be based:

Look, we have got these strict measures in place and they’ll be in place for as long as they are needed.

So there is a lot of community transmission in Victoria. I envisage those border closures will stay in place for a considerable time and we have those declared local government hotspots in New South Wales. So we are monitoring very closely what’s happening in New South Wales and I’m getting daily updates.

Updated

Vicky Thompson, the chief executive of Group of Eight, the organisation representing Australia’s top universities, says the 493 job cuts announced by the University of NSW yesterday are just the beginning. Thompson told Radio National:

Now we are looking at the budgets for 2021 and it’s becoming a very stark reality for us, for all of our universities, that we can’t minimise job losses. So this isn’t the first, it won’t be the last …

Our situation has not been helped by the fact that we have not had access to jobkeeper and that would have at least backed our ability to reduce job losses.

Universities Australia has predicted that 21,000 jobs could be lost across the sector.

Updated

We really have been wearing them all year.

The Northern Territory will open its borders to all but Victorians and people from Sydney tomorrow, and the ABC is reporting that caravan parks on the South Australian- Northern Territory border have already begun to fill up with grey nomads eager to get into the state.

Everyone wishing to travel to the NT will have to fill out an online border entry form 72 hours before they wish to enter. That includes a declaration of everywhere you have been in the past 30 days.

The penalty for lying on that arrivals card is up to three years in prison.

If you’re from Victoria or Sydney you can still enter the NT but you will have to pay $2,500 to cover the cost of your mandatory 14-day quarantine.

Updated

Business leader backs permanent change to jobseeker

Jennifer Westacott was asked about the $2bn jobtrainer program. What does she think of it?

First of all this looks really good. I mean, I haven’t seen all the details,

What about jobseeker (or Newstart) and jobkeeper. Should they be continued, at coronavirus rates? Westacott said she welcomed the federal government’s announcement that jobkeeper would be extended past the September cut-off in areas where it was needed.

On jobseeker, she said:

Clearly we can’t go back to the Newstart allowance, we should not go back to it permanently, that’s a permanent change we should make.

Updated

Unsurprisingly, the chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, is also a fan of suppression – which allows for the community to open up while there is still some level of the virus circulating – over elimination.

She told Radio National:

Well, I think we have to do everything we can to prevent [an outbreak] and, as the minister said, act on the health advice and protect vulnerable people ... but I think we have to keep pursuing this suppression strategy.

Fran Kelly asked if it would not have been better, in the long run, to pursue an aggressive elimination strategy in the first place, as New Zealand did.

If you take that to its logical extreme, Fran, you would say you are not going to open the borders of this country up indefinitely until we find a vaccine.

Is that not already the plan, Kelly asks?

Well, how can we live with that? … We are in for a long haul here. The idea of a vaccine is a long way away ... we have to I think get a risk management approach to this. Get better systems in place for quarantining, for testing, for tracing, for when an area needs to be locked down ... because the alternative is I think serious economic consequences.

And they may be numbers to some people but what are we talking about there? We are talking about people not being able to put food on the table, pay their bills, get through winter.

That doesn’t mean she disagrees with the Victorian lockdown, she says. Victoria has to do what it has to do to control the rapid community transmission.

Updated

Hazzard said NSW continued to support a suppression strategy, which is the official strategy in place in Australia, over an elimination strategy:

Everything we have done from the word go has been based on a suppression stregy. Elimination would be magic if you could achieve it but obviously we don’t have a vaccine.

Hazzard said NSW had increased its ICU capacity and tripled its number of ventilators since the pandemic began.

If the current strategy was followed and individuals took responsibility for social distancing, maintaining good hand hygiene, and never touching communal salt and pepper shakers, he said:

We will be able to live a new life in a normal way, a Covid way.

Updated

Brad Hazzard said:

We are going to have to live with this virus for a long long time. And if we acknowledge that we also have to acknowledge that we have to keep our community as a community, with jobs …

Clearly it’s in everybody’s interests to be able to keep people in jobs, keep peoples’ mental health as well as they can.

Authorities had to strike a balance between maintaining the economy and the health response, he said:

It’s a hard ask to strike a balance in a one-in-100-year pandemic ... We are considering and doing what we think is the balance.

The premier, Gladys Berejiklian, yesterday flagged there could be further restrictions, similar to those placed on pubs, which come into force at midnight. Asked what that could look like, Hazzard said people managing cafes and restaurants should look at the restrictions imposed on pubs and should also wipe their salt and pepper shakers.

He spoke about salt and pepper shakers a lot. If you do not see someone at the cafe wipe them, he said, do not touch them. Managing the virus was the responsibility of all people, not just industry, he said:

Here in NSW we got to a point where people suddenly thought, “Well, that’s all over.’ No, it’s not all over. this virus is here until we have a vaccine. And particularly young people, I might say. Young people, we all remember – well, I vaguely remember when I was young – and we all think we are immortal.

Hazzard also said people should stop “throwing stones” at Victoria, saying “there but for the grace of God go any state or territory”.

Updated

NSW won't follow Victoria into lockdown, health minister says

The NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, has told Radio National that the state does not see any need to return to lockdown, as the number of cases linked to the Crossroads hotel cluster climbs to 34.

We are quite satisfied on the basis of the health advice we are getting, which has been very effective in the last five months so we have no reason to disregard that, is that steps that we have taken to date have been quite sufficient.

Hazzard said Victoria was in a “much more challenging position” and said that “certainly from NSW point of view we are not in anything like that”.

At this stage there is absolutely no need to be considering what they are doing in Victoria.

The NSW chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, told reporters on Wednesday that the Crossroads outbreak had a particularly high viral load, which meant people were becoming infectious one day after contracting it. Usually, that takes several days.

Asked by RN Breakfast host, Fran Kelly, if that meant the outbreak could get out of control quickly, Hazzard said Covid-19 could win a gold medal in the virus-spreading Olympics.

Which, happily, is not a thing.

Updated

The acting NSW Rural Fire Service commissioner, Rob Rogers, has been formally appointed to the position, replacing Shane Fitzsimmons as leader of the NSW fire agency.

Rogers began volunteering with the RFS in 1979 and has been acting in the role since April. He was a deputy commissioner during the horrific 2019-20 fires.

Rob Rogers with Gladys Berejiklian at the RFS headquarters in Sydney
Rob Rogers with Gladys Berejiklian at the RFS headquarters in Sydney. Photograph: Paul Braven/AAP

The NSW emergency services minister, David Elliott, said:

Rob is truly a veteran of the RFS. From his seat on the “Belrose Blitz” [fire tanker] to the commissioner’s chair – the community has benefited from Rob’s leadership in action over successive fire seasons …

We’ve been working in lockstep with Rob Rogers and the RFS to ensure the state is as prepared as it can be to face disaster again this bushfire season.

The appointment was confirmed the day after Rogers and Fitzsimmons appeared before the bushfire royal commission.

Updated

The Queensland Council for Civil Liberties has called on the state government to release the draft of its bill to increase the maximum penalty for breaching public health orders to six months’ imprisonment.

The Public Health Act allows for fines of $4,003 for breaching the chief health officer’s directions, which include entering Queensland without a valid border declaration pass.

The QCLC says the draft should be released so it can be debated before it is presented to the house.

Its vice-president, Terry Gorman, wrote to the health minister on Wednesday requesting that the government consult the Queensland Law Society or the Bar Association, AAP reported. He wrote:

The proposed further Covid-19 legislation containing prison terms of up to 6 months represents a significant increase in penalties and in that regard the proposed legislation should have been the subject of public consultation.

There has been no consultation with this Council and so far as I am aware no consultation with other stakeholders such as the Queensland Law Society or the Bar Association.

Updated

Good morning,

The federal government will unveil its $2bn job skills package, dubbed — can you guess? — jobtrainer. Yes, that naming convention is not done yet. It includes $1.5bn to expand an existing wage subsidy for apprentices and trainees and $500m, to be matched by the states, for free or low-cost training programs intended to help people to reskill.

We will also get the new labour force data out today. It’s expected to show an increase in unemployment.

In Victoria, the ABC has reported that a number of hospitals have moved to impose tighter restrictions on visitors, on top of the restrictions imposed when Melbourne went back into stage three stay-at-home orders. It comes as a significant number of health workers, including six staff at the Royal Women’s hospital, have tested positive to Covid-19.

Doctors working in Melbourne hospitals say they are feeling the strain. Emergency departments are understaffed, and more patients with Covid-19 – including some needing intensive care – are being wheeled in.

Meanwhile, Queensland will today move to pass laws to strengthen its public health orders to include a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment. The health minister, Steven Miles, announced the move on Monday. It will bring Queensland in line with the penalties for breaching a public health order in NSW but legal groups have told the government the change should not be introduced without public consultation.

Finally, 19 Queenslanders who visited the Crossroads hotel in south-west Sydney have now tested negative to the coronavirus.

You can follow me on Twitter @callapilla or email me at calla.wahlquist@theguardian.com

Let’s crack on.

Updated

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