Health News at Your Fingertips

Australia will slightly lift the cap on the number of citizens and permanent residents allowed to return each week, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday, as local Covid-19 cases slow to single digits, Reuters reports.

Australia has since July capped the number of locals allowed to return home each week in an attempt to reduce the threat of spreading Covid-19 once they enter a mandatory 14-day quarantine in hotels.

Morrison said the current cap will rise to 5,865 people in November, an increase of 290, after Western Australia and Queensland states said they would accommodate more locals.

The increase comes amid heightened pressure on Morrison’s government to help some 26,000 Australians that registered their intention to come home.

“The most effective way to get Australians home is to increase these caps,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.

Many, however, have struggled to secure a plane ticket and raise the several thousand dollars needed to pay for hotel quarantine when they arrive back in Australia.

Looking to offer more support, Morrison’s government earlier this month struck a deal with the Northern Territory government to allow up to 500 people each fortnight to return. These are outside the weekly cap, with the first plane landing on Friday.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by more than 10,000 for a second day, with 11,242 new infections, taking the total to 403,291, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Friday.

The reported death toll rose by 49 to 9,954, the tally showed.

Traces of Covid-19 can be successfully detected in sewage, helping to give health officials an early warning of local outbreaks of the virus, the British government said on Friday.

A project, originally launched in June, has now proved that fragments of genetic material from the virus can be detected in waste water, indicating if a local community or institution is experiencing a spike in cases.

The government said this would allow health officials to identify large outbreaks especially where there were carriers not displaying any symptoms and to encourage people to get tested or take precautions.

“This is a significant step forward in giving us a clearer idea of infection rates both nationally and locally, particularly in areas where there may be large numbers of people who aren’t showing any symptoms and therefore aren*t seeking tests,” Environment Secretary George Eustice said.

The sewage-testing project has been working successfully in southwest England and has now been extended to 90 wastewater sites covering 22% of England, the government said, adding it aimed to expand it in future.

Asian markets mostly rose Friday but gains were limited as US lawmakers struggled to hammer out a fresh economic rescue package, while there was little initial reaction to the last presidential debate before next month’s election, AFP reports.

Equities have swung back and forth over the past week as the will-they-won’t-they saga of the stimulus discussions keeps traders on their toes, though observers believe a bill is increasingly unlikely to be passed before the November 3 vote.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said both parties “continue to be engaged in negotiations, and I am hopeful we will be able to reach an agreement” but she warned that opposition to a massive spending plan from Senate Republicans posed a huge hurdle.

With talks still grinding along on Capitol Hill, the focus in early Asian trade was the stand-off between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, with analysts saying the president needed a big win to overturn his Democratic challenger’s lead in national and crucial state polls.

Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, Singapore and Jakarta were all up in early trade, while Sydney and Taipei slipped slightly.

The need for a spending bill was highlighted once again Thursday by the release of data showing 787,000 Americans had signed on for jobless benefits last week, a drop from the previous week and better than expected but still a massive number.

While fresh stimulus would be welcomed, a surge in new coronavirus cases across the US and Europe is fuelling concerns that the already stuttering economic recovery could be knocked off course.

A second wave with record new cases has already forced major economies including Britain, France and Germany to impose partial lockdown measures, leading businesses to warn of massive job losses.

Cisco’s video-conferencing app Webex clocked 590 million participants in September and is on track to record over 600 million this month, nearly double the numbers recorded in March when countries started shutting down due to the pandemic, Reuters reports.

After offices started to close down due to Covid-19, people switched on video conferencing platforms to work from home, leading to swift growth in platforms such as Webex, Zoom Video Communications Inc and Microsoft Corp’s Teams.

While the expansion in Webex user numbers started in March, it has not tapered off, and attendees are at all-time highs in October amid a resurgent pandemic, Jeetu Patel, Cisco Systems Inc’s general manager for security and applications business, told Reuters.

Webex had recorded 324 million meeting participants in March. Zoom disclosed 300 million daily participants in April, and Teams in April disclosed 200 million. The numbers may not be comparable because the companies may use different methods of counting attendees and do not disclose those methods.

Zoom and Microsoft declined to give updated user numbers.

As New Zealanders prepare for holiday long weekend the government is imploring Kiwis to remain vigilant in the face of Covid-19 after an infected man walked into a popular Auckland pub last week.

The Labour weekend is spent by many travelling to holiday hotspots around the country. However, with the use of the government’s Covid tracer app dropping to one of its lowest usage rates, the three-day holiday is also being used to “rehearse” for the Christmas holidays.

“My message to everybody is, the more we prepare the less we’re going to need to respond,” the health minister, Chris Hipkins, said on Friday.

On Friday, there were nine new cases of Covid-19, eight of which were caught at border quarantine facilities. Seven were among fishing crews from Russia and the Ukraine, while the other imported case was an arrival from Iran. The domestic case was a household contact of the marine worker cluster.

There are now a total of 66 active cases of Covid in New Zealand:

In more Asia-Pacific news: Australia’s Qantas airlines has suffered a $100 million hit to its first quarter earnings after several states closed their borders in July in response to Victoria’s coronavirus outbreak.

Chief executive Alan Joyce on Friday said the states’ decisions had delayed Qantas’ recovery. He had expected domestic services to be operating at 60 per cent of pre-Covid levels. Yet the border closures, which include Queensland and Western Australia, mean domestic services are operating below 30 per cent of previous levels.

Mr Joyce told shareholders at Qantas’ annual general meeting that if Queensland opened to NSW soon, he expected domestic capacity to improve to up to 50%.

“We’re expecting to see a boom in domestic tourism once more borders open up,” he said.

The airline aims to save AU$600 million this financial year to stay viable. It’s cut 6,000 workers, is likely to cut 2000 ground handling crew and has stood down 18,000 staff.
Chair Richard Goyder took a swipe at Queensland and Western Australia’s governments, which are yet to open their borders and allow visitors.
These decisions did not seem based on health risk, he said, and ignored the economic and social risk of keeping borders shut.

He identified some Asian countries Qantas may be able to fly to early next year. Korea, Taiwan and some Pacific islands may accept overseas visitors.