Health News at Your Fingertips

Queensland’s Covid update has been released. There have been 10,476 new Covid cases detected.

Sadly, seven lives have been lost overnight.

There are 252 people being treated in hospital with the virus including seven people requiring intensive care.

Demand for workers remains strong, even as the unemployment rate hits historic lows and is destined to go even lower, AAP reports.

The National Skills Commission said job advertisements posted on the internet rose by a further 3.6% in February to stand at 269,700.

Job ads are now 36.2% higher than a year earlier and massive 60.4% above levels prevailing before the pandemic.

Advertisements increased in all eight occupational groups monitored by the commission, with community and personal service workers leading the way with a 7.6% increase in the month.

Recruitment activity rose in all six states and the ACT, but declined 0.5% in the Northern Territory. The sharpest increase was in Tasmania, up 6.6%.

The most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed the jobless rate had fallen to 4%, a level not seen for almost 14 years. The federal finance minister, Simon Birmingham, on Wednesday hinted next week’s federal budget will point to an unemployment rate below 4% in 2022/23.

However, rising cost-of-living pressures and a downturn in consumer confidence is raising concerns over the outlook for household spending – a key plank for economic growth.

Figures released on Tuesday showed confidence has now sunk to levels last seen in September 2020 when Victoria was enduring the second Covid-19 wave.

At the same time, consumer inflation expectations have also hit their highest level in 11 years at 6%, almost double the current annual rate at 3.5%.

The Reserve Bank of Australia governor, Philip Lowe, has warned inflation could hit at least 4%, while economists believe it could reach 5% or more. Fitch Ratings believes the outlook for global growth has deteriorated significantly as inflation challenges intensify.

In Queensland, the health minister, Yvette D’Ath, will speak with the media at 12.30pm Brisbane time.

Vaccine-induced T-cells provide a long-lasting immune response to Covid-19, new research from the Doherty Institute has found.

Tracking the responses of Covid patients following 15 months after infection, researchers have shown that the body’s T-cells provide memory against the virus following vaccination or infection.

Dr Jennifer Juno, a senior research fellow at the Doherty Institute, said despite an initial contraction of the immune response immediately following infection, the T-cells stabilised at six months and remained level after 15 months of monitoring:

Even though some parts of the immune response wane, we can now see that T-cells recognising the virus are quite stable over time. After more than a year, they were still roughly 10-fold higher than someone who had never been exposed to the spike protein through infection or vaccination.

While B-cells are responsible for producing Covid antibodies, T-cells support the development of the B-cell response. Juno said vaccination boosted the T-cells by up to 30 times:

In general, we saw that the vaccines generate the same amount of T-cells as someone who had been infected. We also saw that the third dose does an incredible job at reactivating those T-cells and bringing the levels back up again.

The member for Goldstein, Tim Wilson, has responded to the supreme court’s ruling allowing the independent candidate Zoe Daniel’s campaign signs to be erected before the federal election is announced:

The decision is welcome, we have only ever wanted a consistent Council rule that applies to all candidates equally, and now we can get on with erecting our signs in the coming weeks, just as Simon Holmes a Court’s campaign to buy our community’s voice has been doing for months.

Scott Morrison is asked if there would be any avenues for the government to pursue allegations of bullying following Kimberley Kitching’s death after Anthony Albanese said no formal complaint had been made.

He doesn’t answer directly:

What I find distressing about this is, firstly, [is] the double standard that he’s applying. He’s very quick to throw stones on these issues but when it comes to actually meeting the very standard that he seeks to apply to others, then he fails at the first hurdle and he goes to ground. So I think the hypocrisy and double standard of that I think really just doesn’t sit well with the Australian people.

But the second thing about this is if – if Anthony Albanese cannot stand up to the bullies in his own party, then how on earth is he going to have the strength to stand up to the bullies in our own region? How is he going to stand up to the bullies who seek to coerce Australia’s interests? That’s not – that’s not a good sign. And so our government, I think, has been really clear that we stand up for the interests, we stand up for building dams, we stand up for the big projects that make a big difference that actually drive the wealth of this nation …

Barnaby Joyce and Scott Morrison are asked whether Bob Katter’s opposition to a dam proposal below 395 metres will be a worry as they head into the federal election.

The dam would be Queensland’s largest, sitting at 2,100 gigalitres.

Joyce:

If we facilitated every inquiry that’s ever been made, there would never be a dam built in this nation, never be a railway built in this nation, ever be a road built in this nation. And you get to a point where you just got to go, you got to go, go, go get moving.