Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Brazil has registered an additional 1,156 deaths over the last 24 hours and another 55,891 confirmed cases, the health ministry has said. The South American nation has now registered 85,238 deaths and 2,343,366 total confirmed cases.
Footage of Niagara Falls tour boats highlights the stark differences in physical distancing between Canadian and US-managed companies.
The Canadian tour company Hornblower Niagara Cruises’s ships can carry up to 700 people but Ontario’s strict rules have permitted them to carry only six passengers at a time.
The BBC reports that the coronavirus pandemic has pushed South Korea into a recession, with the country seeing a 2.9% fall in GDP:
South Korea has fallen into recession as the country reels from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
Asia’s fourth-largest economy saw gross domestic product (GDP) fall by a worse-than-expected 2.9% in year-on-year terms, the steepest decline since 1998.
China plans to provide a $1bn loan to make its coronavirus vaccine accessible for countries across Latin America and the Caribbean, the Mexican foreign ministry said on Wednesday, Reuters reports.
Mexico’s foreign ministry said in a statement that China had made the pledge in a virtual meeting between ministers from some Latin American and Caribbean countries.
The Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, was asked again about the lockdown of prisoners in Victoria, after it was revealed that a prison guard who works for security firm G4S at the Port Phillip prison had taken a second job working as a security guard in Melbourne’s bungled hotel quarantine program.
A spokeswoman for G4S told AAP:
In recent days, we have received information relating to an employee who, in early April, undertook secondary employment with a security firm without our knowledge. The staff member concluded this contract work in late April. The matter is now the subject of internal disciplinary processes.
We are not making any changes in that regard as a result of the pandemic.
Mikakos also addressed reports that the hospital in Wangaratta, in north-east Victoria, was left short a significant number of healthcare workers yesterday because the new, tighter border restrictions mean that any healthcare worker based in NSW who travels beyond the border bubble has to quarantine for 14 days upon their return.
That means doctors who live in Albury, which is less than an hour’s drive from Wangaratta, will have to quarantine for two weeks to attend regular shifts or consulting days in the regional Victorian hospital.
He has given me a commitment that he will look at his issue. It is really important that healthcare workers, that is people who work in hospital and paramedics and others, are able to provide those services.
As the coronavirus spreads around the world, there are concerns that it will mutate into a form that is more transmissible, more dangerous or both, potentially making the global health crisis even worse.
What do we know about the way the virus is evolving?
The US federal government has signed a contract with Pfizer for 100 million doses of coronavirus vaccine, once it is approved.
The health and human services secretary, Alex Azar, said on Fox News:
We just signed a contract with global pharmaceutical leader Pfizer to produce 100 million doses of vaccine starting in December of this year with an option to buy a half a billion doses.
Now those would of course have to be safe and effective.
Exclusive: some say it’s ‘unfathomable’ to only have three months to prepare for the Royal Australasian College of Physicians exam amid a heavy pandemic workload
Hundreds of trainee physicians who were told an exam they must pass to be eligible for specialist training would be deferred until 2021 due to Covid-19 are distressed after the Royal Australasian College of Physicians said on Monday the exam will in fact be held in about three months’ time.
The decision will affect around 700-800 physician trainees in Australia and around 100 in New Zealand who are eligible to sit the exam, which involves a written and clinical component.
Gladys Berejiklian says Nine Perfect Strangers cast and crew allowed to isolate at separate location from coronavirus quarantine hotels
The New South Wales premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has said there are “no exemptions” from hotel quarantine for returned travellers despite reports Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban were allowed to isolate at their holiday home in regional NSW.
Media outlets reported on Tuesday that Kidman and Urban, and their two daughters, flew back to Sydney from the United States on a private jet and were allowed to isolate at their home in Sutton Forest ahead of the filming of Kidman’s new mini-series, Nine Perfect Strangers, in August.
AMA wants national network of contact tracers; calls for low-risk prisoner release; Port Stephens in NSW on Covid-19 high alert. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Burney was also asked about the Black Lives Matter march planned for Sydney next Tuesday.
She said both organisers and people who attend the rally need to observe the health advice. Organisers are requiring people to wear masks and remain 1.5m away from each other, as they did at earlier rallies in June.
I will not be telling people who have lost loved ones not to demonstrate. But they have a democratic right to see their local member, to write to their local member and make it very clear what their feelings are.
Labor has been advocating for years that there needs to be justice targets in the new Closing the Gap targets and I understand that’s going to happen. But there is absolutely no way that it is OK that something like 400 people have died in custody since the royal commission and that continues to happen and the incarceration rates of Aboriginal people and Aboriginal young people are completely unacceptable.
Labor’s social affairs spokesperson, Linda Burney, said the new permanent jobseeker rate has to be an amount “where people can live with dignity and children, in particular, are not thrown on to the poverty scrapheap”.
Burney told ABC24:
We have heard that the old Newstart rate, which was $550 a fortnight, was just throwing people into poverty, there was absolutely no way it was an incentive to work.
One of the things that Labor is saying very clearly is we believe that the Government missed an enormous opportunity yesterday and that is to announce a permanent increase in JobSeeker, which Labor and others have been arguing for for a very long time.
Queensland’s work health and safety prosecutor files three charges over the deaths of four people in the Thunder River Rapids ride tragedy
More than three-and-a-half years after four holidaymakers were killed on a Dreamworld ride, charges have been laid against the company behind the iconic Gold Coast theme park.
Ardent Leisure was charged with three counts of failing to comply with health and safety legislation and exposing individuals to a risk of serious injury or death.
Donald Trump has announced his daily US coronavirus briefings will resume and that wearing face masks were “patriotic” as European leaders agreed a huge coronavirus rescue plan and Australia announced it was scaling back economic support as one of its states battles a growing Covid-19 outbreak.
Having almost entirely avoided wearing a mask in public during the pandemic, the US president tweeted that “many people say it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance”. The post came with a photo of the president in a mask, possibly taken at his visit about 10 days ago to the Walter Reed military hospital outside Washington.
The Morrison government will reduce the level of income support paid out under the jobkeeper and jobseeker payments from 28 September, and create two payment tiers for the wage subsidy to ensure the rate aligns more closely with people’s pre-Covid income, rather than giving part-timers and casuals a pay rise.
The overhaul will be unveiled by Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg on Tuesday ahead of an economic statement the government will deliver on Thursday. As well as lowering the rate of both the jobkeeper wage subsidy and the $550 coronavirus supplement in jobseeker after September, the government will tighten the eligibility requirements for both payments – including retesting businesses in October.
Investigation into how infection control breaches are believed to have led to a Covid-19 outbreak starts today. Follow all the latest news and updates, live
Neal said the inquiry had received a number of submissions about “what went well, and what went less well” in managing hotel quarantine in Victoria.
He said that, without preempting anything to come in the inquiry, the following issues had arisen for discussion:
Neal said the inquiry, which is not hearing from any witnesses today, will hear evidence “of a scientific and medical nature about what has been understood about the spread of the virus from the hotel quarantine program into the community”.
It will also hear about the impact of the virus in the community, and the “various steps taken by government agencies and public health officials in response to that impact are matters of profound and ongoing significance to this community”.
Understandably, there has been intense community interest and daily commentary in the media about this program. Increasingly over recent weeks there has been growing and understandable community concern about transmission from that program into the general community.
To establish and implement the hotel quarantine program, a range of contractual and other arrangements were entered into between government departments, hotels, a number of private service providers, private security companies, medical services, transport and food providers. It’s anticipated in the course of the inquiry that you will hear from various witnesses that the purposes of the directions and the contractual arrangements entered into was to either eliminate or reduce the public health risk posed by Covid-19 by containing its spread from returned travellers into the community.
As set out in the order in counsel establishing this inquiry, information already available to the inquiry suggests the possibility of a link between many of the cases of coronavirus identified in the Victorian community in the past few weeks and persons who were quarantined under the hotel quarantine program. Comments made by the chief health officer to the media have suggested that it may even be that every case of Covid-19 in Victoria in recent weeks could be sourced to the hotel quarantine program.
The British pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline has bought a 10% stake in a German biotech company that is a key player in the global race for a coronavirus vaccine as part of a deal that could eventually be worth more than £800m.
GSK on Monday said it will pay £130m for the stake in CureVac. GSK will also make a separate payment of £104m that will fund research into CureVac’s development of messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines.
Denmark will allow merchant sailors stranded at sea since the outbreak of the coronavirus to come ashore and be reunited with their friends and families, the Business Ministry has said.
The United Nations has made an urgent appeal for US$283 million to help Sudan tackle the coronavirus pandemic and its economic consequences, as millions in the country face hunger.
An official said the pandemic had worsened an economic crisis, hitting purchasing power, while movement restrictions had restricted people’s access to food, healthcare and basic services.
South Africa’s death toll from coronavirus has passed the 5,000 mark, according to official figures released on Sunday by the continent’s hardest hit country, AFP reports.
South Africa registered 85 new deaths from the virus in the previous 24 hours, bringing the death toll to 5,033. A total of 13,449 new infections were also officially diagnosed, taking the number to 364,328, figures released by the health ministry showed.
The coronavirus situation in Hong Kong is “really critical”, with a record 100 new infections recorded on Sunday, the territory’s leader, Carrie Lam, said, as Melbourne became the first city in Australia to make wearing masks compulsory in response to a resurgent and aggressive outbreak there.
Hong Kong was held up months ago as a model for its success in keeping down Covid-19 cases in the crowded city-state of 7.5 million people, but its caseload – although still low by European and American standards – had grown by a third in the past fortnight to nearly 1,800. Lam has shuttered bars, gyms and nightclubs in the past week and on Sunday announced new guidelines including mandatory mask-wearing indoors.
Thirty-nine people were detained after police were attacked with “a hail of bottles” at an open-air party in central Frankfurt attended by thousands of youngsters, police in the German city said today..
Five officers were injured in the riot that began at around 3:00 am (0100 GMT) when police intervened to stop a brawl involving around 30 people in Frankfurt’s historic Opera square.
People who travel outside of Ireland have been warned they will invalidate their travel insurance even if the place they visit is on a so-called ‘green list’ of safe countries to by published this week, the Irish Times reports.
It added that travel insurance exclusions denying cover to people who travel contrary to official guides are the norm across the sector. At present, the advice from the Irish Government is that non-essential journeys overseas should be avoided.
Victoria has recorded 363 new Covid-19 cases and three more people have died as premier Daniel Andrews announced face masks will be made mandatory across Melbourne as the state attempts to control a second-wave outbreak of the virus.
At a press conference on Sunday, Andrews appeared wearing a face mask and said residents in metropolitan Melbourne and the Mitchell shire would be required to wear “masks or face coverings”, including bandannas or scarves in public from midnight on Wednesday.
Australia’s acting chief medical officer warns people in Sydney are not taking precautions ‘as seriously’ as in Melbourne
Victoria has recorded 217 new cases of Covid-19 and three more deaths, as the prime minister, Scott Morrison, announced parliament would be postponed due to the health risks of MPs travelling to Canberra from Melbourne and south-western Sydney.
Katharine Murphy sits down with Guardian reporter Paul Karp and Nine senior economics correspondent Shane Wright to discuss the Australian economy and the government’s various stimulus packages. As conditions remain grim, with 992,300 Australians out of work, and the unemployment rate rising to 7.4% in June, how will the government navigate Australia’s recovery?
India has become the third country to record more than 1m coronavirus infections, following the US and Brazil, as it reported 34,956 new cases in the past 24 hours, taking the national total to 1,003,832.
New peaks continue to appear around the world, including an alarming rise in the Brittany region of France.
That’s where we might leave this blog for now. You can keep up to date with global news on The Guardian website or come join me on the new Guardian live blog launching soon.
Labor MP Amanda Rishworth is also speaking with ABC. She agrees the parliament must follow medical advice, but says the cancellation of this sitting fortnight makes it difficult for the opposition to scrutinise government.
Question time is a really important forum which the opposition can ask the government questions, and every MP has a chance to raise their voice in parliament. So this is critically important that we have parliament sitting. It is a really important vehicle.
Yes, there is the Covid committee, but parliament itself is the opportunity for every MP from around the country to bring the concerns of their constituents. So it does make it more challenging [if it is not sitting].