Health News at Your Fingertips

The second case in Queensland is a 37-year-old nurse from Ipswich hospital, who was working with Covid patients.

He had no symptoms other than abdominal pain – which is a rare symptom for Covid – but it turned out that yes, he had it.

So he is also in isolation. Queensland health minister (and yes, he is also the deputy premier) Steven Miles said the health worker had been taking precautions.

This underlines how we can all do the right thing by monitoring our health and if we have any symptoms at all that are of any cause for concern, we can go and get tested so we thank him very much for that.

Back to Queensland, Annastacia Palaszczuk says a Victorian man, who was positive for Covid, has been apprehended by police, after travelling to Queensland by plane.

The 48-year-old man arrived on JQ560 at 9.19pm – people who were on the flight are being contacted.

He has been placed in quarantine after he was identified as coming from a hotspot – Victorian authorities then contacted Queensland and said he had previously tested positive for Covid, so now they are working out whether a crime has been committed.

Queensland has recorded two new cases of Covid in the last 24 hours.

One is a student at Staines Memorial college at Redbank Plains – a close contact of a student who had tested positive. The school is closed for two weeks for deep cleaning.

I think this is the lowest case number since July.

Helen Haines is hosting a press conference with the crossbench at 9am as the group continues to push for a national integrity commission.

She wants to introduce a package of bills – one for a federal integrity commission and one setting out commonwealth parliamentary standards.

The government had promised a federal integrity commission, of a sort. It wants to keep it and any proceedings connected to anyone under investigation completely under wraps until the end of any court case – as long as it ends in conviction – but there has not been any movement on the legislation in months.

This is noteworthy as it is one of the few times Labor has voted no on legislation this parliamentary term.

Yes, I know I wrote “porn” instead of “pawn” a little earlier (I have an old brain injury which means that when I am tired I sometimes substitute words which sound the same or rhyme, which makes my speech interesting as well) but it has been fixed – you might need to refresh your browser if you are still seeing it.

The government is pushing through legislation today, which would make mobile phones a “prohibited” item inside Australia’s immigration detention centres.

Those phones are a lifeline for refugee and asylum seekers detained within our immigration detention centres. And without them we wouldn’t know what was happening inside. The government says it wants to ban phones as it claims they are being used to try to organise escape attempts and facilitate organised criminal activity.

Advocates say they are the only contact many inmates, who are on the edge, have to the outside world.

The bill would also make it easier for guards to conduct searches, including strip-searches.

The parliament passed a similar bill in late September 2017 but it lapsed when the parliament was dissolved in 2019. In 2018 the federal court ordered the ADF ban on phones was unlawful, so here we are again.

The bill will pass the House, where the government has the numbers, but the Senate is going to be more tricky. Labor will be voting against the legislation – which is the first time in ages Labor has voted against legislation in the parliament, what with the pandemic and all.

So that makes the Senate numbers interesting. The Greens are against it. Rex Patrick and Stirling Griff (formerly Centre Alliance, now independent) are unknowns, and Jacqui Lambie will play a key role as well.

Stay tuned.

The Victorian aged care response centre has put out its latest data:

• For the first time since the Response Centre began operating there is only 1 facility categorised as high risk. This is a significant milestone in the stabilisation of aged care facilities in Victoria.

• There were 13 facilities in the Response Centre’s ‘high risk’ category in early August when the Centre first began operating.

• Over the past week the number of facilities with outbreaks has dropped by 21.

• The total number of aged care outbreaks since 1 Jan 2020 is 163. Last week there were 126 facilities with outbreaks. There are 105 which are currently active.

• There are currently 1209 active cases in aged care in Victoria.

• There have been a cumulative total of 3997 cases in aged care in Victoria.
  • 1787 residents
  • 1719 staff
  • 491 close contacts which are neither staff nor residents of the facility

• Total number of deaths associated with aged care outbreaks in Victoria is 420.
  • There were an additional 38 reported deaths on 31 August 2020, of which 27 happened prior to 29 August 2020.

• Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel have visited a total of 252 aged care facilities to date.

• The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission has conducted 6 ‘spot checks’ on facilities on 31 August 20, bringing the total number of checks conducted to 118.

Anthony Albanese was asked about the border closures while on Brisbane radio 4BC this morning:

I think that the premiers have to act on medical advice and Annastacia Palaszczuk is doing that. If you look at the outcome for Queenslanders, it is pretty good. There does need to be, of course, some common sense and some application of exemptions and those issues need to be dealt with. That should have been coordinated, frankly, by the so-called national cabinet. I do wonder why it is that the prime minister pretends he has no say in the decisions in national cabinet.

And the other issue, of course, is our international borders. So many Aussies who are cannot get home. And that is directly a federal government responsibility. And that needs to be dealt with.