Health News at Your Fingertips

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.

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.

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].

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.