Health News at Your Fingertips

Melbourne will have a team of six traffic managers amid concerns about road congestion in the wake of last year’s coronavirus lockdown, reports AAP.

The congestion management team starts next month and will be tasked to deal with incidents and breakdowns.

It will also look at ways to ease traffic flow.

The Victorian government says traffic patterns have shifted in the wake of coronavirus, with trips on Melbourne’s arterial road network increasing rapidly compared to freeway volumes.

The government said it had created about 100 new traffic management jobs, including 12 incident response officers in six vans.

Victoria’s mass vaccination hub has opened its doors today.

It’s open to everyone over 70 and all those eligible for phases 1A or 1B. From 3 May anyone over 50 can also go there for vaccinations when all states open up the eligibility requirements from the AstraZeneca Jab.

If you have a spare second, it’s really worth reading this opinion piece from long time GP Dr Adrian Plaskitt discussing the decline of mental health services in Australia.

Here is a little bit of it:

I am a GP who has worked in the Hunter region since 1999. This may be longer than you anticipated, but it is so rare to be given an opportunity to tell the truth as I see it that I thought I would make the most of it.

First of all, I want to talk about the general level of service as I have observed it.

During my career there has been a general reduction in service for the severely mentally ill, while the provision of service for mild illness has probably improved. General awareness of mental health has improved, but it is increasingly defined as an illness that effects an individual, which may obscure some societal drivers of mental illness – but I’ll come to that later.

You can read the full piece below:

Miller has again contested assertions that hotel quarantine has, by and large, been a success.

Tens of thousands have been through quarantine that never had Covid. We don’t know if they were handled properly or not. One in 200 of the positive cases has been leaking out which is a terrible track record for hotel quarantine across Australia and internationally.

So we absolutely cannot say that this has been a success in any regard. It has been a human rights catastrophe. People have been trapped in there and infected with the virus later in their stay on repeated occasions and we need this to stop right now.

We need to fix what we can within that system certainly but move people out, if you can, right away and start putting up a mining camp which should only take a couple of months and you can put one within 100km of a major airport airport in most cases. You can house thousands of people as the mining industry have been doing for decades in Western Australia.

The head of the Australian Medical Association in WA, Dr Andrew Miller, is making the media rounds this morning and has just appeared on ABC News.

He says many policymakers are “in denial” about the airborne nature of the virus.

There’s still denial of that – not only in hotel quarantine but in healthcare where these people might need to go for attention. Our nurses and doctors are not being given full airborne PPE all the time, and proper ventilation.

There is really a problem with this expert advice which is led in to a whole cascade of issues, and this one-in-200 breakout of the disease from hotel quarantine which is just a predictable, avoidable, preventable disastrous human rights problem.

A man has been charged and a police strike force established after a violent brawl after a soccer game in Sydney’s south, reports Liv Casben from AAP.

Riot police were called to Rockdale just after 5pm on Sunday after reports of the brawl involving men reportedly armed with metal star pickets, bricks, flares and plastic crates.

Three men were taken to hospital and treated for cuts to their limbs. Video footage shared on social media shows flares being let off and objects being hurled between two fan groups.

Police have established strike force azure and a 23-year-old man has been charged with being armed with intent to commit an indictable offence and offences related to rioting.

The Granville man will face Sutherland local court next month and has been banned from any national premier league games as part of his bail conditions.

Rockdale Ilinden – known also as Rockdale City Suns Football Club – posted a message on its Facebook page condemning the violence.

Suffice to say that the club strongly does not condone antisocial and criminal behaviour.

No local Covid-19 cases in Queensland today, although only 2,767 tests.

The Victorian government has released data on the rates of mask compliance on public transport (where they are still required).

Looks like the public is doing well in the morning, but get lazy during afternoon peak hours.

Dozens of Afghan interpreters who have worked on the battlefield alongside Australian soldiers have made an urgent plea to the federal government for humanitarian visas, fearing they will be murdered by the Taliban when troops withdraw later this year.

Kate Banville has the story:

The 41 interpreters wrote to the home affairs and immigration departments via the Australian embassy in Jordan in January, and again on 19 April after the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced that Australia would follow the US by withdrawing all remaining troops by September.

In the April letter, the interpreters detailed a “dire threat”, saying the rate of “targeted killings has increased exponentially” across Afghanistan.

“Roughly 300 interpreters and their families’ members have been killed since 2016,” it said.

“As 2021 commenced, we lost two interpreters who were engaged in assisting the foreign troops in terms of translation and interpretation based on the stories and reports shared by local media.”

You can read the full report below:

I mean, not that it will do us much good, but looks like if you really wanted to you could travel to Greece quarantine free now. (Although of course you’d have to quarantine on your way back – if you can get back.)

Greece is planning to formally opening up to tourists on 15 May, but on Sunday the transport ministry announced a number of countries including Australia, Russia, New Zealand, South Korea, Thailand, Rwanda and Singapore could gain access early, Reuters reports.

But this comes with a catch: you must be vaccinated or test negative for the coronavirus.

Greece, which emerged from the first wave of the pandemic last year in much better shape than many other countries in Europe, has been hit badly in recent months, with rising numbers of patients putting hospitals under severe strain in many areas. (So I wouldn’t expect Scott Morrison to announce a bubble with the Mediterranean nation any time soon.)

However, prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said last week the pandemic was showing signs of stabilising and he confirmed plans for a 15 May opening of the vital tourism sector, which accounts for a fifth of economic output.

Despite a stuttering start to vaccinations in the European Union, the Greek government says it is better placed this summer than last year thanks to widespread testing, quarantine hotels and vaccination drives on small islands and among tourism workers.

Authorities reported 1,400 new cases and 57 deaths on Sunday. The pandemic has caused 333,129 infections in Greece and 10,007 deaths.

Federal opposition frontbencher Tanya Plibersek says WA premier Mark McGowan is right to criticise the federal government’s approach to borders. (This isn’t a huge surprise given they are both Labor.)

She has managed to squeeze in an impressive number of federal government mistakes in her first 30 seconds as well.

I think Mark McGowan is right to ask questions about how quarantine and our borders are being operated. It is a real shame to see this outbreak again. But the reality is, of course, that things aren’t going to get back to normal until we’ve got a fully vaccinated population. We’re running way behind. This is a federal government responsibility. Along with aged care that was such a disaster, along with the Covid tracing app. We’ve got to get our borders right.

I reckon we have to sip for every mistake she mentioned! I’m counting five in the sentences!