Health News at Your Fingertips

Twenty prisoners have signed up to help fight Western Australia’s next bushfire season. Karnet Prison Farm inmates have volunteered to help reload water, fire retardants and foam for water bombing aircraft, AAP reports.

The prison superintendent, Ray Edge, says they’ll be trained, then put on standby seven days a week. And they “take great pride” in their work, he says. They’ve proven themselves before by setting a record reloading 110 planes in one day during the devastating Waroona-Yarloop fires in 2016.

Very sick patients in rural hospitals are waiting up to two days for a flight to bigger hospitals, AAP reports. The Rural Doctors Association of Australia president, Megan Belot, said:

At the best of times it takes time to get transfers. You really have to argue or beg for a bed for certain people and with Covid it’s going to take a lot longer.

She’s also worried small rural hospitals don’t have the negative air pressure rooms to stop Covid spreading.

Melissa Davey reports there are also long wait times for ambulances in Victoria – to the point where people are making their own way to hospital. Read her report here:

Scott Morrison, in Rome for the G20 before he goes on to Cop26 in Glasgow, took the time this morning to talk up people going shopping in Melbourne. They’re “rushing back to retail”. It’s a sign, he said!

“It’s just another sign that the national plan is opening up our economy as our vaccination rates rise and Australians start reclaiming the things that Covid has taken from them.

The health minister, Greg Hunt, said those vaccination rates will mean more people will be treated at home, because they’re less likely to need to be hospitalised. “And so the balance will shift from hospitalisation to community care,” he said.

It’s The Dish’s birthday tomorrow! The Parkes radio telescope that was immortalised in a great Aussie film notches up 60 years tomorrow. And long after it helped in the Apollo mission, it’s still helping humans explore the universe…

There have been no new Covid-19 cases reported in Queensland.

Victoria’s emergency management commissioner, Andrew Crisp, has said efforts to clean up damage caused from recent weather will be focused over coming days before more conditions deteriorate again on Wednesday.

Crisp also said some residents are still without power across the state.

There have been 5,000 requests for assistance as a result of the storms in recent days, with about 4,000 of the requests relating to trees that have fallen down and cut power lines or blocked roads.