Health News at Your Fingertips

Hello everyone. This is Luke Henriques-Gomes, taking over from Caitlin Cassidy for the remainder of the day.

The Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull courtship continues, this time over climate targets.

WA Health is reporting one new case of Covid-19 overnight.

Contact tracing teams are following up 10 close contacts and 60 casual contacts of a truck driver who tested positive in Victoria on 5 October.

So far 62 people have returned a negative test result with the other results pending.

The driver, who is now in South Australia, was in WA between 30 September and 3 October, was potentially infectious during that time, but health authorities say the risk to the public remains low.

Over in Sydney, Everest race day is getting under way, and 10,000 punters are eagerly streaming into Royal Randwick.

Dust off your fascinators, etc.

The crowd was initially capped at 5,000, but the premier, Dominic Perrottet, granted an exemption for the $15m race to double its capacity with a Covid-safe approval to have one person per 4 sq metres.

It is the first major event since lockdown was lifted on 11 October, and I can’t imagine there’s any chance it will result in transmission of Covid-19.

New Zealand’s Super Saturday is a hit, with record vaccinations and a lower number of daily COVID-19 cases , AAP reports.

Saturday had been dubbed Super Saturday by prime minister Jacinda Ardern, with a series of community events and aimed at upping NZ’s lagging vaccination rates.

With more than half the population – including greater Auckland, Northland and much of the Waikato – in a form of lockdown, broadcasters also screened a nationwide telethon – or “vaxathon”.

Celebrities including Taika Waititi, Lorde, Marlon Williams and sports stars appeared on the eight-hour live broadcast, all backing the vaccination effort.

I’m not sure who would appear on Australia’s vaxathon, but I do like the sound of it.

Ardern’s ambitious goal was to get 100,000 Kiwis – or two per cent of the population – vaccinated in a single day.

A total of 69,582 people had been vaccinated by 1pm, including 19,773 first doses.

An exultant Ashley Bloomfield, NZ’s director general of health, said Kiwis had broken the 100,000 barrier just after 3pm:

Already there and more to come. Let’s do this. Fantastic effort. Go whanau (family).

Speaking live on the vaxathon, Ardern called for 150,000 jabs. “Go big or go home,” she said.

The vaccination drive will be a huge help as New Zealand confronts a Delta outbreak which is forecast to worsen. The government predicted this week case numbers would reach about 140 per day by the end of the month.

Ten refugees currently held in Australia’s offshore detention system will be granted asylum in Canada before Christmas, following a collective effort of donors, volunteers and organisations in Australia and Canada.

Eight individuals and a family group of two have been approved by the Canadian government to resettle in Vancouver and Toronto, the first approvals for refugees being sponsored by the Operation #NotForgotten partnership.

For the past two years, the Refugee Council of Australia (RCOA) has been working with Vancouver-based migrant and refugee settlement service MOSAIC and volunteer network Ads Up Canada to resettle refugees first sent to detention in Papua New Guinea and Nauru in 2013.

Since November 2019, applications for 150 refugees and 96 separated family members have been lodged through Operation #NotForgotten but the Canadian government’s assessment process has been significantly delayed by Covid-19.

Of the 10 approvals, six are currently in PNG after years of detention on Manus Island and four are in Australia, having been medically transferred from PNG and Nauru.

Under Canada’s refugee sponsorship scheme, sponsors are responsible for providing income support for refugees for the first year after arrival and must have raised the designated levels of income support before an application can be lodged.

Around $AU19,000 is required for an individual and around $AU32,000 for a family of five.

The news follows the closure of Papua New Guinea as an offshore detention centre by the end of the year.

Some 107 people still remain on Nauru, which is continuing indefinitely. Of those transferred to Australia for medical care, 88 remain in detention.

Former Test cricketer Jason Gillespie says he is shocked by evidence to a NSW parliamentary inquiry that has raised questions about the state’s kangaroo harvest, AAP reports.

A report on the health and wellbeing of kangaroos and other macropods, tabled in the upper house on Friday, casts doubt on the accuracy of kangaroo population estimates used to set cull quotas.

Greens MLC Cate Faehrmann said the findings had convinced her that culling kangaroos was “unnecessary, unsustainable and cruel”.

Echoing the concerns, Gillespie labelled the killing of wildlife depicted on the coat of arms “a national disgrace”:

The kangaroo is a native species, it belongs to our land. How can we continue to allow its commercial killing? It’s time to stand up and show the world Australians care about the protection of the kangaroo.

The NSW inquiry heard of inadequacies in the monitoring of kangaroo populations and oversight and scrutiny of non-commercial licences granted to landowners to shoot them.

Faehrmann is urging state environment minister Matt Kean to consider the evidence before signing off on a new five-year commercial kangaroo harvest management plan before the end of the year.

The commercial killing of kangaroos is also in the spotlight ahead of World Kangaroo Day on 24 October.

Australia’s record when it comes to protecting native species has been criticised as lamentable. It has the world’s highest rate of mammal extinctions and some 400 native animals listed as threatened.

Twelve LGAs in Tasmania have been listed as hotspots by Queensland health authorities.

The new restrictions will come into effect from 1am Sunday, 17 October.

Anyone who has been to a Covid-19 hotspot in the past 14 days or since the start date identified for the hotspot isn’t allowed to enter Queensland, unless they are a Queensland resident, someone relocating to Queensland or have an exemption.

Weimar is asked how the state’s hospital system will cope with rising Covid-19 numbers, considering there is a fortnight delay, give or take, on hospitalisation rates.

Cases have hovered around 2,000 for the past three days:

There is a huge amount of work going to prepare the hospital system for the growing caseload, the caseload that we expect to see in the weeks ahead.

If I look at the increase today in hospital admissions, about 100 more than this time yesterday, and we put that down to the significant rise in numbers we saw a week or 10 days ago, that is typically how long it takes for the numbers to feed through.

Hospitals and health services are doing an amazing job in caring for people. Here we have 43 Covid patients and in Casey we have 37 patients. That is a lot to bear in an individual setting in those patients need a lot of complex care from health staff. We have a lot of work happening across the hospitals in creating more space and CovidSafe. That has an impact on the capacity across the wider system to care for other people in clinical care.

Weimar is providing a breakdown of today’s case numbers. He says there is a “fairly predictable spread” across the south-east suburbs, with the highest concentration of cases in the LGA of Casey.

In our northern suburbs, we have 457 cases, that is now under a quarter of today’s cases, and we are seeing over the last days or two weeks a consistent pattern whereby the northern suburbs are a decreasing share of the state’s Covid activity.

In our western suburbs, we have about a third of our cases today, 642 cases, in the eastern suburbs, 111 cases, and in the south-east, 602 cases.

There have been 168 new cases in regional Victoria, including 22 in Greater Shepparton, 26 in Geelong, 17 in the Latrobe Valley, 22 across Warragul and Drouin, 17 in Bendigo and 16 in locked-down Mildura.

Victoria has passed the milestone of 5 million vaccine doses administered since the rollout began. Some 65.3% of eligible Victorians are now double-dosed.

Weimar:

I am delighted to confirm over 5 million Victorians have now received their first dose of vaccine. So over 5,006,000 Victorians are now at least first-dose vaccinated. That means 88.5% of the over 16 population has now had their first dose, and 64.3% have had double dose, and all those numbers continue to rise across all those age groups in a really encouraging way, and my thanks to everybody who continues to come out and get vaccinated, really good to see, especially … as we hurtle towards our 70% and 80% milestones for double-dose vaccination.