Health News at Your Fingertips

My colleague Matilda Boseley will be taking over the blog for a short while.

The latest case of Covid-19 in the Australian state of Queensland is a woman who may have been infectious while working at a Brisbane nursing home.

The facility at Pinjarra Hills in Brisbane’s west had already been locked down after the woman’s husband tested positive on Friday, reports AAP.

The health minister, Steven Miles, said extra nurses had been provided to the facility.

All 150 staff and the residents at the home are being tested.

“We are working with them to keep all residents safe,” Miles said.

The woman is the wife of a 27-year-old Bellbird Park man who was confirmed to have the virus on Friday.

We will have more on the situation in the Philippines later today.

A second person died of coronavirus complications in Vietnam, officials said on Saturday, a day after it recorded its first-ever death as it struggles with a renewed outbreak after 99 days with no local cases.

Both men died in a hospital in Da Nang, a hot spot with more than 100 cases in the past week, more than half of them patients, Associated Press reports.

The Health ministry said a 61-year-old man died on Friday evening of septic shock and chronic kidney failure. The country’s first fatality was a 70-year-old who was being treated for a kidney illness.

Da Nang is Vietnam’s most popular beach destination, and thousands of visitors were in the city for summer vacation. Across the country, authorities are rushing to test people who have returned home from the coastal city.

Fifteen other patients with Covid-19 are in critical condition, officials said. All have other underlying illnesses. On Saturday morning, the health ministry confirmed 12 more cases, all linked to the hospital.

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro told a crowd in the state of Rio Grande do Sul on Friday to accept they would probably all catch the coronavirus one day.

Bolsonaro, who has previously tested positive for Covid-19, said in an online video on Thursday he was being treated with antibiotics for a lung infection.

According to the Brazilian newspaper Folha, the president told the crowd on Friday: “Sadly, I think you almost all of you will catch it one day. What are you afraid of? Face it.”

Brazil has recorded 92,475 deaths from the virus, according to the latest statistics.

US deaths from the novel coronavirus rose by at least 1,453 on Friday, the biggest one-day increase since 27 May, to reach a total of 153,882, Reuters reports.

Cases rose by at least 66,986 to a total of 4.58 million, with some local governments yet to report.

The rise in deaths was the biggest one-day increase since fatalities rose by 1,484 on 27 May.

The death toll in Australia has exceeded 200 after three further deaths were recorded in Victoria and one person died in New South Wales.

There have been 201 deaths in the country since the pandemic began.

Those who died in Victoria were: a man in his 80s, a woman in her 80s and a woman in her 90s. The state’s death toll is now 116.

In NSW, an 83-year-old man connected to an outbreak at a popular pub, the Crossroads Hotel in south-west Sydney, died on Saturday, taking the state’s death toll to 52.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has faced a grilling over reports that the families of people in aged care homes stricken by the coronavirus are unable to find out which hospitals their loves ones have been moved to.

Andrews said the federal government was working hard to resolve the issue.

I raised this matter with the PM, he is actioning this. I have not got an update today, this was yesterday or maybe the night before. I know they are working hard to try to have better call centre arrangements. We know there are cultural and language issues at play. That is not all of it, but that is a lot of the challenge.

In the Australian Capital Territory, there have been no new cases of Covid-19 recorded in the past 24 hours, authorities have announced.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has said authorities are a “united team” after he was quizzed about a shake-up of the state’s public health team.

The restructure includes Annaliese Van Diemen, the deputy chief health officer, returning to “her former duties”, while three new officials have joined as deputy chief officers.

The Northern Territory in Australia has recorded one new coronavirus case, the health department has said.

The woman is the partner of the man who tested positive to coronavirus Covid-19 yesterday. She is in isolation at the Royal Darwin hospital.

In response to a call from the Australian Medical Association from all businesses except essential services to close, the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, says only that various options are being considered.

What we have at the moment are numbers that are too high of community transmission and that is a concern to us.

Andrews says authorities are working through what steps, if any, to take next.

Victorian authorities are putting the focus on what the police minister, Lisa Neville, calls “appalling behaviour” from residents who have been found breaching the rules.

Neville cites three cases: a person who drove from Melbourne to Wodonga on the NSW border “to buy a Big Mac”; a person who travelled from Melbourne to Ballarat for “fresh air”; and a person who drove across Melbourne, from Werribee to Springvale, to “buy groceries”.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, says he will not be announcing “further steps” today to curb the pandemic, but “we are giving due consideration to a whole range of different options”.

When I am in a position to announce decisions, I will do that and I will take questions at that time.

The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, has also confirmed there are now 5,919 active cases in the state, with 379 patients in hospital. There are 41 people in intensive care units, including 24 who are on ventilators.

Andrews says the situation in the state’s aged care system is “very serious”.

The biggest challenge is the growing number of “mystery cases”. There are 49 of those, he says.

You cannot be certain if there is even more further community transmission, more mystery cases out there. That is in some respects our biggest challenge.

Of the 397 new cases in Victoria, premier Daniel Andrews says are 37 links to outbreaks and other complex cases, and 360 are under investigation.

The 397 new infections are a marked drop from the more than 600 reported on Friday, but Andrews warns it is still a significant number.

While there is always a temptation to try and read trends into these numbers, there is a growing concern in relation to the number of community transmission cases within that data.