Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Easier because remote working routines have already been established and because, this time, we know what to expect. And harder, because we know what to expect.
A major research effort is under way to understand whether Covid-19 can spread through tiny airborne particles that are released by infected people and remain suspended in the air for hours.
Scientists are working alongside sanitary engineers at the World Health Organization to investigate how tiny aerosols bearing the virus may be released into the environment; whether they are spread around rooms by air-conditioning units; and how infectious the particles may be.
The Ministry of Justice has announced that cleaners in its central London offices will now receive full pay if they are self-isolating or off sick. The arrangement, which will be administered through cleaning agency OCS, also provides back pay for cleaners who were sick or self-isolating after 1 April.
The announcement follows Guardian reports in June that the MoJ failed to investigate a potential Covid-19 cluster among its cleaners. The cleaners’ union, United Voices of the World (UWV), warned in April that workers felt forced to continue working despite feeling unwell because they could not afford to losewould have lost money.
Confusion over NSW-Victoria border closure as the state’s northern border closes for the first time in a century and Melbourne prepares for lockdown. Follow the latest news
Someone asks about some sort of foreign travel tax? I don’t know - there is a lot in the question, and it’s involving shiz that none of us can even think about until at least July next year, because I’m not sure if this is common knowledge or not - but Australia’s international borders ARE CLOSED.
Scott Morrison:
Well, there’s a lot of speculation on all those questions. So I don’t intend to engage in what is the normal budget speculation when you lead up to a budget.
Those matters will be addressed in the budget.
On what we are planning on doing with Hong Kong residents, Scott Morrison says:
We continue to be concerned about issues in Hong Kong as many nations are, and we have remained in close contact with other like-minded countries about this issue.
This is about how we, as a nation, are responding, domestically, to these issues.
On the issue of the broader shutdown of Melbourne - this is a matter that the Premier advised me of and, of course, based on their advice and the advice that I have received from the chief medical officer, then this was necessary.
I hope it isn’t for that long. I hope it’s for a shorter period as possible.
Review into vaginal mesh and other products reveals much patient harm was ‘avoidable’
An arrogant culture in which serious medical complications were dismissed as “women’s problems” contributed to a string of healthcare scandals over several decades, an inquiry ordered by the government has found.
The review of vaginal mesh, hormonal pregnancy tests and an anti-epilepsy medicine that harmed unborn babies paints a damning picture of a medical establishment that failed to acknowledge problems even in the face of mounting safety concerns, leading to avoidable harm to patients.
While ministers insist that it is too early to fully consider what lessons might be learned from the coronavirus outbreak, the UK’s death toll – the highest in Europe – is expected to prompt an inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.
In recent weeks, the government has been accused of seeking to pre-emptively shift the narrative on responsibility for the country’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak and blame others for what went wrong.
The Department of Health and Social Care has recorded a further 155 deaths in the UK in its latest daily update on coronavirus. That takes the official UK death total to 44,391.
As we try to point out every day, this official headline total used by the government is not the actual total. That is because these figures only include people who tested positive for coronavirus and died. Taking into account the deaths of people who did not have a test, but where coronavirus was cited on the death certificate, the real total is more than 55,000.
The Welsh health minister has expressed concern that workers at a food factory where there has been an outbreak of Covid-19 might be spreading the virus because they take it turns to use the same bed.
Speaking at the Welsh government’s daily briefing, Vaughan Gething said there had been a suggestion that workers were coming off shift and jumping into a bed just vacated by a housemate who then went off to work.
I’m genuinely concerned about the conditions that people live within, not just in houses of multiple occupation where people may share bathroom and toilet facilities or kitchens, and the opportunity for contact indoors and surfaces is an obvious concern. You’ve heard that from our scientists, and others.
But in particular, if there is reality to the suggestion that people are sharing beds, there’s an obvious risk if people finish one shift, then return from that shift to get into a bed that someone has just got out of. So there are real issues here about accommodation and how it may be an unhelpful factor in driving transmission within that workforce.
A record high of 191 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday has prompted the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, to reintroduce stage three restrictions across all of metropolitan Melbourne.
“I think a sense of complacency has crept into us as we let our frustrations get the better of us,” Andrews said. “I think that each of us know someone who has not been following the rules as well as they should have.
Helping grieving relatives reach a difficult decision without hectoring or judging is a fine art
“What kind of God would do this?” she sobs and rocks. I am sinking in my chair and the nurse is perched on the side table. To focus on something other than her palpable despair, I regard the worn sofa and imagine a public hospital meeting room with comfort and sunlight. When a daughter arrives, she squeezes in beside her grieving mother.
She is a woman plainly devoted to God and her children, especially the unmarried daughter who is now my patient. The second daughter strikes me as thoughtful and educated, and as becomes evident, helpless to stem the tide of her mother’s sorrow. I fret at this, not because I am rushed, rather the patient needs an urgent outcome.
The world is treating the health and economic symptoms of the coronavirus pandemic but not the environmental cause, according to the authors of a UN report. As a result, a steady stream of diseases can be expected to jump from animals to humans in coming years, they say.
The number of such “zoonotic” epidemics is rising, from Ebola to Sars to West Nile virus and Rift Valley fever, with the root cause being the destruction of nature by humans and the growing demand for meat, the report says.
Melbourne’s Covid-19 spike has prompted the ‘unprecedented’ move to stop people coming into NSW from Victoria. We look at the details, from how to get a crossing permit to whether you need to self-isolate
Channel Nine initially promoted One Nation leader’s comments describing people locked down due to coronavirus as ‘drug addicts’ who ‘cannot speak English’
Channel Nine’s Today show has dropped One Nation leader Pauline Hanson as a “regular contributor”, after she described residents of public housing in Melbourne who are locked down due to Covid-19 as “drug addicts” who “cannot speak English”.
In a statement, the channel described her comments as “ill-informed and divisive”, and said “she will no longer be appearing on our program as a regular contributor”.
My impression is that the population thinks that it’s all settled down now and everything’s OK. And that’s not true. Every time you go on to the intensive care unit you get a visual reminder of why it’s not, because of the amount of equipment that you have to put on to just go and simply say hello to a patient.
Seeing the images from Italy had been terrifying. We were all wrestling our own demons, organising our personal affairs, getting wills done that we’d put off for years. When the worst of it hit it was really hard watching the team cope with the rush of reality. I think the new additions to the team that we had built were hit the hardest. People dying in intensive care is not new, but dying without family and friends around them is very unusual. This was a another new normal to adjust to; phoning family to tell them their loved one was dying, or dead, but they could not see them.
At the same time, there was something uplifting.
Everyone had a kind of common focus and a common goal – normally everyone just gets on with doing their own thing – but we had large teams of people working together with the one focus. There were so many people. Everything was masks and sweatiness. When people took their gear off they had deep marks around their faces and that kind of matted look to their hair.
We’re still admitting patients with Covid-19 although obviously not as many as at the peak. We are currently getting about 200 patients a day coming in through A&E. About half of them have symptoms that are related to Covid, so they’re sent to the Covid side where they can be assessed and treated. All the medical staff are fully equipped with PPE because we’re anticipating that the patient has Covid until the tests prove they don’t.
It slows everything down. Everything has changed. I get a bun on my way to work – it’s my Friday treat. When you go in, you’ve got to put alcohol gel on your hands, so that’s the end of the bun. To walk through the hospital you have to put a mask on. Nobody lingers in the corridors any more. When you go into the ICU, there’s more PPE – a new mask first and more alcohol gel. Going to see a patient in a side room you’re getting on a plastic apron with arms, two pairs of gloves, a different face mask, face shield.
At the peak, we made space for about 300 Covid beds on our two sites. Now we’re back down to our normal 100 or so.
The real difficulty now is that we know full well there’s a bunch of patients out there who need management of their underlying conditions, such as operations or transplants. We’ve been working towards starting that up again but it’s difficult. It’s not a tap you can turn off and on.
If someone has been waiting years for a kidney transplant, and an organ became available, how would we get them into hospital in a safe way? We can’t ask them to self-isolate for two weeks – that’s not how organs appear. We’ve been trying to set up a system to make sure the transplant recipient is safe, because they’re immuno-suppressed.
That’s why I’ve been worried about ending the lockdown, and people going back to how things were six months ago. That needs to be pushed back against, we can’t go back.
We’ve been preparing for this weekend as if it’s New Year’s Eve. We’ve discharged as many people as we can. We’ve had to bulk up the daytime shifts, the evening shifts and the night shifts. I’m just hoping that people are sensible.
Front of magazine’s ‘Madness’ issue attacked as attempt to glamorise mental illness
Vogue Portugal has been criticised for insensitive treatment of mental health on one of its latest magazine covers.
The image – one of four covers created for its July/August “Madness” issue – features model Simona Kirchnerova crouched in a bath flanked by two nurses, with one pouring water over her head. The cover has been criticised both for attempting to glamorise mental illness and for the use of the outdated term “madness”.
Barrister says Home Office’s unwillingness to protect 11-year-old makes a mockery of FGM protection orders
Human rights lawyers have launched a scathing attack on the Home Office for failing to grant asylum to an 11-year-old girl found by judges to be at high risk of female genital mutilation if removed from Britain.
The girl, who is thriving at school and only speaks English, was brought to the UK in 2012 by her mother, herself a victim of what is known as type 3 FGM whose two sisters died after being cut in their native Sudan.
The US will be on a “red list” of high-risk countries that people in England are advised not to visit for non-essential reasons because of its continued high level of coronavirus cases, the government has confirmed.
Travel restrictions will be relaxed in England for more than 50 countries including nearly all EU countries, British territories such as Bermuda and Gibraltar, and Australia and New Zealand.
Team is using new approach that could be cheap and scalable and become the norm within five years
Prof Robin Shattock would have liked slightly longer to develop the revolutionary approach to vaccines that he is pretty sure will not only save lives in the Covid-19 pandemic but become the norm for vaccine development within five years.
His team at Imperial College were working on Ebola and Lassa fever vaccines using new technology but had not got as far as human trials when a novel coronavirus started to kill thousands of people in Wuhan, China.
The US recorded a new all-time daily high of 52,000 new Covid-19 cases on 1 July, according to Johns Hopkins University figures, as Donald Trump repeated his belief the virus would ‘just disappear’.
America has now had more than 2.7 million confirmed cases - more than double that of Brazil, the second most-affected country. Dr Anthony Fauci, the US’s top infectious disease expert, has said the country is ‘going in the wrong direction’, infections could more than double and the subsequent death toll ‘is going to be very disturbing’.
The Guardian’s Ed Pilkington looks at why a patchwork approach to lifting lockdowns, as well as the president’s mixed messages on wearing a mask, have led to confusion across the country and why some states are having to clamp down