Health News at Your Fingertips

Passengers of the fateful Ruby Princess cruise ship voyage and families of those who died after contracting Covid-19 on board have filed a class action against the operators.

The class action is being run by Shine Lawyers. Class actions practice leader, Vicky Antzoulatos said it is alleged that Carnival and Princess Cruise Lines broke Australian consumer law by breaching consumer guarantees and by engaging in conduct that was misleading and deceptive. The legal action will also allege that operators of the Ruby Princess were negligent and failed in their duty of care to provide passengers with a safe cruise.

There were 2,700 passengers on the voyage.

Antzoulatos:

We say the owner and operator knew of the risks that passengers may contract coronavirus before the ship left and they failed to take steps to ensure their passengers were safe and protected.

People on board the ship trusted Carnival to do the right thing but they were not told about the risk of coronavirus and some paid the ultimate price for it.

More than 20 people have died, many remain gravely ill, while others struggle daily with the grief of having lost a loved one or having to care for a very sick relative.

One of the class action members, Graeme Lake, lost his wife Karla to Covid-19 10 days after the Ruby Princess returned to Sydney from an 11 day cruise on March 19.

It broke me, it broke the kids, and she didn’t deserve it. Karla went on that cruise to celebrate her 75th birthday and what happened to her has destroyed us. I am doing everything I can to get justice.

McManus said that if Australia had the biggest budget deficit since the second world war, it should also have the biggest investment in nation-building projects since the war too.

Yesterday, the treasurer said that it is just as bad as after world war II. After world war II, what did we do? The government invested in big national infrastructure projects and local manufacturing in all of those things … it left a legacy and that’s how we have to look at this, as a country.

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) has stepped up its calls for national paid pandemic leave to ensure that people are encouraged and supported to self-isolate when necessary.

Lack of sick leave and insecure work have driven much of the spread of the coronavirus in Melbourne’s northern and western suburbs, according to the Victorian government, which has said nine out of 10 people do not self-isolate when they get sick and one in two don’t self-isolate while waiting for their Covid-19 test result.

Victoria yesterday announced a new $300 hardship payment for people who have been tested for Covid-19 and are awaiting their test result, on top of the $1,500 one-off payment available to people who do test positive. But that’s well below what workers may have earned in a fortnight — and they could be off work for much longer.

The ACTU secretary, Sally McManus, told ABC News Breakfast the “economic and health issues are entwined”.

We can’t recover unless we can get the virus under control. A bit like having a leaky pipe. Workers are unfortunately going to work when they’re waiting for test results or when they’ve got symptoms. So we’ve got to plug the leaks. We know that they’re there, and the way to do it is to take away the punishment that people have when they stay at home and isolate, which is sometimes losing their job, but quite often, losing all their wage.

So if we could take that away, that is one way of controlling the virus, because people know that they can safely isolate and they’re going to be supported. They won’t lose their pay and it means that so many more people will stay at home because we just take away that punishment for isolating.

McManus said it wasn’t possible to say how long people might have to be on leave for, because it depended on the test waiting times in the state they were living in, the nature of the exposure to the virus, and the test result.

She said the pandemic should spur a conversation about workforce insecurity – and that conversation should happen now.

The whole coronavirus situation has exposed just how vulnerable insecure workers are. One in three workers in our country don’t have paid leave … If we can take something good out of this coronavirus, let’s emerge stronger and let’s reduce the number of insecure jobs we’ve got.

Chalmers said an economic crisis of this magnitude, with unemployment queues this long, “will inevitably change how we think about government” in this country.

He said the risk of mismanaging it is you could create “pockets of unemployment that cascade through the generations”.

Interestingly, in this interview Chalmers is only talking about training as it applies directly to jobs, not education generally. I would have thought the impact of school disruptions, particularly for students in preschool and early primary, and then at the other end in year 11 and 12, would have an even more devastating impact.

The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, has been on Radio National this morning, again criticising the Morrison government for not announcing a plan to rebuild the economy when it announced that huge deficit and record high debt.

Chalmers said there “needs to be a plan for jobs in the economy when jobkeeper trails away”.

That’s March next year, when it will already be just two-thirds of what it is now and, for part-time workers, less than half of what it is now.

Chalmers said Australia “should be doing better than the rest of the world”. We went into the pandemic in a better position. We’re pretty rich, generally.

For the government to say ‘oh our jobless queues are better than they are in Trump’s America’, I don’t think that washes with people, I think that’s cold comfort to them.

Before we get into the news of the day, let’s take a moment to reflect on what the news would have been had the pandemic not happened.

The opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympic Games was scheduled to be held today. It’s been postponed by to 2021, and last night Olympic rings were lit up in the city to mark there was one year to go.

The Australian sporting sector is still working through the cost of the postponement, with no guarantee the games will actually go ahead next year.

Good morning,

National cabinet will meet today to discuss the growing coronavirus outbreak in Victoria as well as the economic update, which yesterday announced Australia was facing deficits of $85.8bn in 2019-20 and $184.5bn in 2020-21 – the highest since the second world war. It will also discuss the new Closing the Gap strategy, which has been approved by the joint council but still doesn’t have any new money attached to it – and with the new fiscal position announced yesterday, that seems increasingly unlikely.

Tighter restrictions will come into force in NSW today. They cap group bookings at restaurants, clubs and cafes at 10 and venue capacities at 300 — the same rules that are already applied to pubs. Funerals will be limited to 100 guests and weddings and corporates to 150, with strict “no dancing, no singing, no mingling” rules.

In Victoria, the Australian Medical Association is warning that the aged care system is on the verge of “collapse”, made worse by plans to limit aged care workers to working at a single facility to stop the spread of the virus. The sector is highly casualised, and many people work across different facilities to make a living.

The president of the Victorian AMA, Dr Julian Rait, said:

We are concerned aged care may be so under pressure in just the next few days it will cause collapse and severe system stress.

And finally, Queensland has added the Sydney local government area of Fairfield to its declared hotspot areas, subject to strict border controls, because of the growing outbreak linked back to the the Thai Rock restaurant in Weatherill Park.

Let’s crack on. You can follow me on twitter @callapilla or email me at calla.wahlquist@theguardian.com.