Health News at Your Fingertips

The treasurer has just stepped up for his press conference.

First presser announcement off the block this morning:

Just noting that federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg will be giving a press conference in 10 minutes to release the final budget outcome.

Sticking with Victoria for a moment, the health and safety watchdog yesterday charged the Victorian health department with 58 breaches of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, with regards to its hotel quarantine program.

The key charge is that the Department of Health failed to provide a safe working environment for its employees and put non-employees at risk.

The charges relate to Operation Soteria, which was the name of the hotel quarantine program between March and July 2020. It was the breaches of that program that led to the deadly second wave.

The department now faces more than $95m in fines for the breaches, which include failing to appoint infection control experts at hotels and failing to provide training or instructions for the use of personal protective equipment.

In a press release, WorkSafe lays out the charges and the breaches:

In all charges, WorkSafe alleges that Department of Health employees, Victorian Government Authorised Officers on secondment, or security guards were put at risk of serious illness or death through contracting COVID-19 from an infected returned traveller, another person working in the hotels or from a contaminated surface.

This complex investigation took 15 months to complete and involved reviewing tens of thousands of documents and multiple witness interviews.

One of the education unions in NSW has raised concerns at the state fast-tracking the reopening plan.

The Independent Education Union’s acting NSW secretary Carol Matthews was on Sunrise earlier, and questioned whether school buildings would be properly ventilated by next month:

Look, will we are quite disappointed about the lack of consultation about the changes.

There was no consultation, certainly with the union for the non- government sector, and I don’t know whether our employers were consulted. I suspect they weren’t.

It’s one thing for teachers to be ready for classes – I’m sure they will be – but it’s quite another for the buildings to be ready for the students.

One of the things we have really learnt with this virus is that good ventilation and air filtration is important and you can’t do that overnight.

Linda Burney, shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, was on RN Breakfast this morning, and said she thinks the reason the number of fully vaccinated First Australians lags so far behind the broader population was due to a “lack of political will”:

There is a lack of political will. I can’t put it down to anything else. The gap is widening in every single jurisdiction, despite the fact that Aboriginal people were supposed to be a priority in the vaccination rollout.

Burney slammed the government for indicating that vaccine hesitancy was the issue, saying it was “patently wrong”:

I am so sick of the federal government using vaccine hesitancy as the reason for this. That is just patently wrong.

Vaccine hesitancy requires a response and if it is the case in some places then the messaging is the important thing, the way things are communicated.

She also said she was informed that some communities in NSW with large Indigenous populations had their vaccines diverted to western Sydney earlier in the outbreak:

General Frewen stated two or three weeks ago that there’d be a vaccination push in 30 communities. We’ve heard nothing since about how that’s going or whether it’s started … What has happened to that program?

Let’s talk schools in NSW.

At a crisis cabinet meeting last night, the NSW government decided to bring forward school start dates by a week.

So kindy, year 1 and year 12 students will now return on 18 October.

Years 2, 6 and 11 return on 25 October, and all other grades will resume on 1 November.

Teachers will only be allowed on-site if they are fully vaccinated.

This comes as NSW thunders ahead with its vaccine rollout, looking to cross 63% today and 70% sometime next week.

We will be expecting to hear more details of the plan later today at the daily NSW Covid update.

You can read more on the story here:

Good morning, Mostafa Rachwani with you this morning to go through the early headlines.

We begin in Queensland, which yesterday recorded only one new case, raising hopes the state has again dodged an outbreak, but Brisbane and the Gold Coast are on high alert after dozens of new exposure sites have been released. Hundreds of people have entered home quarantine over the past week, and mask mandates have been introduced, but there no further restrictions yet. We’re still waiting to see if this will impact the NRL grand final.

In NSW the government will bring forward a return to school. The crisis cabinet decided late yesterday to bring forward schools reopening one week earlier than originally expected.

It comes after the state recorded its worst daily death toll in the pandemic, with 15 deaths recorded yesterday.

Victoria recorded another record number of daily cases yesterday, with 950 locally acquired cases and seven deaths. The state is bracing for more cases and greater strain on its health system, with the outbreak’s peak still uncertain.

It comes as the federal government signed off on a final multibillion-dollar business assistance package for NSW, Victoria and the ACT, with an announcement expected today. The goal with the bailout is to bridge the gap between the date disaster payments are wound down and when states and territories will hit 80% fully vaccinated.

And rumbling along will be the pressure on Scott Morrison to cement an emissions reduction target after state and territory commitments pushed the spotlight on to the federal government.

This comes after Malcolm Turnbull yesterday rubbished the government’s new submarine deal, its dealings with France, and most interestingly, announced he will go to Glasgow for Cop26 while the PM continues to toss up whether to go or not.

As always, we’ll bring you the inevitable rush of press conferences and everything in between. Stay tuned.