Health News at Your Fingertips

The consumer watchdog says it’s received more than 10,000 complaints regarding travel bookings during the pandemic, AAP reports.

In some cases, travel agents are providing partial refunds but withholding thousands of dollars which they say are needed to cover their costs.

A parliamentary economics committee on Friday heard there had been a six-fold increase in total complaints during the Covid period, many relating to travel services.

In relation to travel bookings, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is not taking its normal “enforcement” approach, but rather decided to work with travel agents and tour operators to ensure consumers either get a full refund or some of their money back.

ACCC commissioner Sarah Court said the main concern of the watchdog was misrepresentations made to consumers that they are not entitled to any refund.

“We’ve seen examples of retrospective changes of terms and conditions by some companies,” she said.

She said it was not the ACCC’s position that all customers must get full refunds.

“Terms and conditions often do allow for withholding of exactly the sort of deduction or commission or labour cost as long as it is reasonable and appropriate.”

ACCC chair Rod Sims said post-pandemic there would be an opportunity for a broader look at the issue.

“Some have suggested a redress scheme that would sit over the top – some other countries have got that – (but) we haven’t turned our minds to that.”

New South Wales has reported 7 new cases of Covid-19, all in hotel quarantine. There were no local cases reported.

Andrews says he will get to watch the second half of the AFL grand final on Saturday, because in the first half he will be in meetings deciding what restrictions will ease for Sunday.

He predicts it’ll be close but Geelong will beat Richmond by one goal. And that’s the end of the press conference.

Andrews can’t say where chief health officer Prof Brett Sutton is today. He had yesterday off, and he hasn’t been in the press conference since Monday.

Sutton has not made an appearance at the daily presser since the hotel quarantine inquiry released letters that showed he did not think emails should be provided to the inquiry indicating he was included in a 27 March response to the federal government that explained private security would be used in hotel quarantine.

Sutton has said he did not absorb the information at the time.

Andrews denied it is unusual for Sutton to not appear at the press conference for the past few days, and said Sutton would be at the press conference on Saturday.

Andrews says two mystery cases will drop off the 14-day number on Saturday, and one will drop on Sunday. So barring any other outbreaks, Victoria will be down to seven mystery cases on Sunday when the announcement around restrictions easing will occur.

Andrews has a go at people who are protesting the restrictions again today. He says it is still against the CHO orders to protest.

You should stay at home. Protests don’t work against this virus and potentially put at risk all the good work we are done.

We want to get the place open and make announcements on Sunday. If people are out protesting, that does not help.

Andrews is asked whether stores should have a QR code login system for registering people who visit. He says pen and paper can work (and did for the Kilmore cafe outbreak) but he thinks there will be more QR code systems over time.

Worth noting New South Wales has its own QR code system that restaurants and other venues can use.

“Everything is on the table” Andrews says on whether hospitality limits could be extended further than planned, and the 25km limit could be dropped.

He says he the Sunday restrictions easing announcement will lay the groundwork for what the next few weeks of easing of restrictions will be like, but he rules out having suburb-specific rules for places with outbreaks because the nature of Melbourne is people work and live across a number of suburbs.

Daniel Andrews says it is his intention for international flights to resume coming to Melbourne before the end of the year, but says it will depend on the report of the hotel quarantine inquiry (currently due 6 November).

There will be – we know there are a significant number of Aussies who are overseas and want to be home by Christmas and I’d very much like to have them flying direct into Melbourne, those that need to come to our state, flying direct.

The new positive case linked to the northern Melbourne school has had very few contacts outside of the house, Weimar said.

Weimar says now that active cases are at 100, the state is able to manage the active case numbers, and the Department of Education is working at communicating quickly with those schools where students test positive.

Why did it take so long? Weimar says the vast majority of people required to isolate have done that, but the misunderstanding with a close contact child attending school when they should not have means they’ve had to re-evaluate how it is communicated to people that they need to isolate.

Is it an order for those 800 people to isolate? Weimar says yes.

So if we go back to how we now approach these kinds of outbreaks, so we have identified primary contacts. Primary contacts are required to isolate and they will be tested, we will be contacting them directly, we have contacted them directly, and we will be testing them and this work is ongoing. Their secondary contacts are also required to isolate. Generally that tends to be the people living in their household as is the case of the 83 or so close contacts we have at East Preston Islamic College.

Their families, around 400 people in total, are being required to isolate. We are 390 additional secondary contacts from other close contacts that we are working through in this wider outbreak.

Victoria has now done testing of sewerage in 42 locations, and on Tuesday found traces of Covid-19 at Ararat. A pop-up testing clinic has been set up at the East Grampian Health Service for people to get tested if they have symptoms.

Weimar says in other locations where traces of Covid-19 has been found in sewerage, they haven’t found any additional cases.

We tested around 15% of the population in both Anglesea and in Apollo Bay, we in the end did not find a definitive case of coronavirus. But this is what – what the surveillance testing identifies for us is – it is a warning sign that says that either somebody has travelled through the area who has been shedding the virus, it may be an old case in the community or somebody who has come back from an another part of the state, but it may be a new case.