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Victorian COVID-19 update
Victoria's Deputy Premier, James Merlino, is due to hold a press conference at 9am with Minister for Child Protection, Luke Donnellan, and Disability Ageing and Carers Minister, Gabrielle Williams.
We are unable to stream their press conference live, but our reporter on the ground will bring us the latest.
Victoria's calendar of zero-case 'doughnut days'
This calendar tracks Victoria's run of days with no COVID-19 cases, an extraordinary achievement :
Relief as Melbourne’s COVID wards are disband
Less than three months ago there were 675 coronavirus patients hospitalised across Victoria, including 44 needing intensive care.
Today Melbourne's COVID wards are being disbanded, our health reporter Aisha Dow writes.
Dylan D'Roza worked in a COVID-19 unit at Sunshine Hospital.Credit:Eddie Jim
Staff at Sunshine Hospital waved goodbye to their last coronavirus patient on ward 2G - a nursing home resident in his 70s - weeks ago. Within a few days, the ward would cease being a COVID-19 unit.
Just two people with the disease remain in Victorian hospitals. There are none in intensive care units, with the last discharged in early October.
Most of the wards around Melbourne that were rapidly repurposed as COVID-19 units have returned to treating other ailments. Ward 2G at Sunshine Hospital is now caring for people with pneumonia and other lung issues.
"You could see the team relax," said nurse unit manager Dylan D’Roza. "During a huddle once, we all just looked at each other in silence. We just knew that this was good ... it was a nice feeling."
'Really, really exciting': Queensland CHO hopeful Victoria has eliminated COVID
Queensland's Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young is hopeful Victoria has eliminated COVID-19 following its long stage-four lockdown.
Dr Young is hopeful her state will be able to welcome Victorians, without having to quarantine, in time for Christmas. A decision is expected by the end of the month, with any changes to become effective from December 1.
Queensland's Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young.
Victorians are currently required to go into mandatory hotel quarantine for 14 days at their own expense if they want to enter Queensland.
"I'm sure they're starting to feel there's a good chance they've eliminated the virus in Melbourne which is really, really exciting," Dr Young told ABC Radio Brisbane.
"So, hopefully, we will be able to open borders to Melbourne and not require any form of quarantine.
"It's really exciting when we see where Melbourne is ... I just want to see a little bit longer how they go in Melbourne because they've now removed so many of their restrictions, we've just got to see if there's any undetected virus circulating because people will be out and about."
Queensland reopened its borders to all states and territories, except Greater Sydney and Victoria, on November 3.
A dozen doughnuts: Victoria records 12 days in a row of no new COVID-19 cases
The figures are in and Victoria has recorded its 12th day without a single COVID case! That's a dozen "doughnut days", as we like to call them.
And it comes after nearly 20,000 tests were carried out, a very reassuring sign. Well done Victoria!
NSW Premier ‘mortified’ Victorians could visit Queensland before Sydneysiders
By Josh Dye
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has excoriated the Queensland government in the ongoing spat about border closures.
Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young says quarantine requirements for Victorians could be dropped in December, in time for Christmas.
Queensland could welcome Victorians into the Sunshine State in time for Christmas.Credit:Getty Images
Ms Berejiklian said she was “mortified” by the notion that Victorians could be allowed into Queensland before Sydneysiders, who are blocked from entering the state because Greater Sydney is defined as a hotspot.
“I think it’s cruel, I think it’s unjustified and I think it’s spiteful. There’s no health or scientific basis to it,” she told the Today show this morning.
“NSW has demonstrated that you can manage the pandemic by keeping the community safe, but also by keeping people in jobs and keeping people mobile and relatively free in a COVID-safe way.”
Ms Berejiklian questioned the basis for Queensland’s medical advice, which the state is relying upon to deny Sydneysiders entry.
“I don’t know what that medical advice is based on. I’ve never ever heard of that 28-day period. I’ve never, ever heard having to trace each source of infection within two days. I don’t know where that’s come from,” she said.
“Why Queensland has given us that 48-hour deadline I don’t know. because it doesn’t seem to exist anywhere else.”
Front pages of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald
Coronavirus vaccine leader began with a wild cancer research idea
Here's a fun fact for your Wednesday morning: BioNTech SE's path toward a successful COVID-19 vaccine started more than a quarter of a century ago with a pair of German doctors and an idea: harnessing the immune system to attack not viruses, but cancer cells.
The concept was initially seen as crazy, Chief Medical Officer Ozlem Tureci recalled nearly two years ago. But she and her husband, BioNTech Chief Executive Officer Ugur Sahin, persisted. They persuaded a pair of billionaire twin brothers to invest and built a team of scientists, including other early leaders in the field of messenger RNA vaccines.
Late one evening in January, after Sahin read a troubling study about the spread of COVID-19 in a family that had visited Wuhan, China, he turned to Tureci. While the two often engage in scientific back and forth, "there was not too much debate on this paper," he said in an interview earlier this year. They both knew they had to move fast.
Almost 11 months later – the blink of an eye in drug research terms – the experimental vaccine BioNTech developed with big pharma partner Pfizer delivered preliminary results from a 43,538-person study on Monday, showing it blocked more than 90 per cent of COVID-19 cases. For Sahin, who is 55, and Tureci, 53, that success is also a validation of the new type of drug that they've spent their careers chasing.
"It is the validation of a rigorous scientific approach as well as a validation for the technology," Sahin said. "It could open the pharmaceutical field for a new class of molecules."
You can read more about their amazing discovery, here.
Let me also draw your attention to our Please Explain podcast. In our latest episode, senior journalist Jacqueline Maley is joined by healthcare reporter Emma Koehn to discuss Australia's investment in coronavirus vaccines and mRNA technology.
'No overnight miracle': Warning as only one in five Australians to get access to vaccine
Yesterday's big news came from the US, where pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced its coronavirus vaccine is 90 per cent effective according to its latest trial.
The results are exciting, medical experts say, but Australia has secured access to only enough doses for a fifth of the population and there is currently no global distribution network that can handle it.
The first patient enrolled in Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine clinical trial at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, receives an injection in July.Credit:AP
Health Minister Greg Hunt said the country was on track to have a vaccine available for those who wanted it by the end of 2021, with "positive" data coming from all four vaccine programs with which the government has agreements, including Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech.
Professor Robert Booy, a University of Sydney infectious diseases expert, said while the preliminary results were "very exciting", some caution was needed.
"There's never been a mRNA vaccine licensed and used routinely in humans, therefore we have to retain some sense of caution around its introduction," he said.
mRNA vaccines, which work by training the immune system to recognise part of a virus's genetic code and prompting an immune response, need to be transported at extremely low temperatures.
Professor David Tscharke, head of the department of immunology and infectious disease at Australian National University, said creating a global supply chain for the vaccine was doable but could be expensive.
"We don't have global distribution for a vaccine of this type. The critical thing is it requires ultra-refrigeration and that can be difficult to maintain," he said.
Mr Hunt said Australia was planning for an initial rollout of the COVID-19 vaccination program within the first quarter of next year. It was preparing for temperature requirements ranging from 8 degrees to -70 for each of the vaccine candidates.
The government's deal with Pfizer/BioNTech is for 10 million doses. Because the vaccine requires two doses to be effective, it would cover 5 million people.
Australia also has agreements to purchase the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and a local candidate from the University of Queensland and CSL Ltd.
CSL this week started manufacturing millions of vials of one of the most promising coronavirus vaccines in its Melbourne laboratories, in the hope trials will prove it is effective and can be rapidly distributed.
The global biotech company said the total processing time for the vaccine is approximately 50 days. The vaccine is still subject to approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration for use in Australia.
As virus spikes, Europe runs low on ICU beds, hospital staff
In Italy lines of ambulances park outside hospitals awaiting beds, and in France the government coronavirus tracking app prominently displays the intensive care capacity taken up by COVID-19 patients: 92.5 per cent and rising.
Italy - the nation where the pandemic erupted in Europe - registered 37,809 new confirmed coronavirus infections, a one-day record and nearly 9 per cent more than the previous day's caseload on November 6.Credit:AP
In the ICU in Barcelona, there is no end in sight for the doctors and nurses who endured this once already.
Intensive care is the last line of defence for severely ill coronavirus patients and Europe is running out of beds and the doctors and nurses to staff them.
In country after country, the intensive care burden of COVID-19 patients is nearing and sometimes surpassing levels seen at last spring's peak.
As we mentioned earlier, more than 300,000 people have died of COVID-19 across Europe, according to a Reuters tally.
With just 10 per cent of the world's population, Europe accounts for almost a quarter of the more than 1.2 million deaths globally from the disease.
AP, Reuters
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2020-11-10 20:25:00Z
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