Summary
- Victoria, NSW and Queensland all recorded no community transmission yesterday, but all three states recorded two new cases in hotel quarantine.
- The global death toll from coronavirus has reached two million people, barely a year after the virus first emerged.
- Emirates has dumped their flights to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane after another cut in the international arrivals cap, in another blow for stranded Australians trying to get home.
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How airlines are deciding who gets to fly home
By Sue Williams
A top-notch first class air ticket from London to Sydney priced at $36,895? The fastest business class flight from Paris to Melbourne at $25,352?
Yet while both fares involve massive cash splashes, neither guarantees an actual seat on a plane. And with around 37,000 overseas Australians now registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade as wanting to return home as a result of COVID-19, that's enormously frustrating.
Airlines are having to reduce passenger numbers on international flights in order to fit within the federal government's cap.Credit:Getty
"It's just all so chaotic," an airline official told Traveller.
"The landscape keeps changing all the time, incoming passenger caps go up and down, other countries alter their policies on who can transit, people's circumstances shift. It makes it impossible to lay down any hard and fast rules."
Fares have soared due to the federal government's incoming passenger caps, which has meant airlines are only able to carry a few dozen passengers on planes built to accommodate hundreds.
For stranded Australians like Rebecca Giles, who is trying to get home from London, it's a battle. She bought a business class ticket through Singapore Airlines for $7534 in November to fly on January 4 but then Singapore put the brakes on planes from the UK because of its highly-infectious mutant virus strain.
"I had to cancel that ticket but I could find absolutely no economy tickets for any date, any month, out of the UK to Australia," said the Sydneysider. "The only ticket I could then find was an Emirates first class ticket for an amazing £5200 (A$9160) one-way to Perth.
"I bought that and kept an eye on the website all the time and managed to move it forward to February 4. But who knows whether I'll still be able to fly now with the reduced numbers allowed into Australia?"
Passengers and crew onboard a Qantas Boeing 737-800, flight number QF735 from Sydney to Adelaide at Sydney Airport.Credit:Getty Images
Airline bosses say it's impossible to estimate just how many Australians there are for each seat available as the number of seats – and Australians able to fly – change constantly.
"But it's safe to say that demand far outstrips supply," said another.
The decision on who gets those places rests with each airline, but there are no real systems in place to determine them. An Emirates spokesman said the airline was carefully following the Australian Government's directive to restrict capacity on all inbound international flights until February 15 and, with DFAT, also takes into account compassionate and humanitarian grounds.
"Despite the capacity restrictions, in most cases a large portion of our seats are allocated to economy class travellers with the remainder allocated to first and business class," he said. "This proportion varies for each flight and depends on several factors including connectivity beyond Dubai and size of groups travelling together."
WA border with Victoria softened after another day of no community cases
By Hamish Hastie
Western Australia's hard border with Victoria will be relaxed from Monday at midnight after the state went a ninth day without a locally acquired case of COVID-19.
After receiving new health advice about Victoria on Friday afternoon the WA government has decided to downgrade the state from a 'medium risk' to 'low risk'.
WA's border will be relaxed with Victoria on Monday.Credit:WAtoday
The downgrade means people travelling from Victoria to WA no longer need an exemption to enter the state from January 18, though they will still be required to self-isolate for 14 days.
The hard border still applies to anyone who is trying to enter WA from Victoria but has been in either New South Wales or Queensland in the 14 days prior.
Health Minister Roger Cook said the adjustment to border controls had been recommended by the WA Chief Health Officer on the latest public health advice.
Victoria records three cases in hotel quarantine
Victoria has recorded no new locally acquired cases of coronavirus and three among international arrivals in hotel quarantine, in the last day.
Victoria has achieved a ten-day run of zero local coronavirus cases. Health Minister Martin Foley insisted on Friday it was still too dangerous for the state to allow people back from Brisbane and Sydney "red zones" despite welcoming international tennis players this week.
The state reported zero locally acquired cases and three new cases among international travellers in hotel quarantine on Saturday. More than 14,900 tests were completed on Friday.
Mr Foley said on Friday that he understood the frustration of Victorians stranded in Sydney or Brisbane, which are still considered red zones by the state government, but he did not want to risk another outbreak in Victoria.
Grounded: Qantas stuck on the tarmac in pandemic recovery journey
By Patrick Hatch
Qantas boss Alan Joyce made a typical boast this week: that his airline was in a better position than any other in the world to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
If true, it's a case of being the best in a bad bunch. Just a day earlier, the peak body representing airlines globally warned that the industry remained in a "perilous" position.
Qantas planes grounded in April. Credit:Jason South
Forward bookings for February and March are still down 80 per cent, more airlines are set to collapse and passenger numbers are not set to recover to 2019 levels until 2023, the International Air Transport Association said.
Qantas shut down its international operations and cut its domestic flying to just 5 per cent of normal levels when the crisis struck last year.
Australia's almost unparalleled success in stopping the spread of coronavirus should have set the country's biggest airline up for a rapid return to the skies. But the mammoth task of repairing its finances is facing severe delays, as state governments continue to slam their borders shut at the first sign of any COVID-19 outbreak.
Stranded Australians desperate to come home as political buck passing continues
By Deborah Snow
Each morning, Brian Fisher and his wife Martha Walkowsky wake to an overwhelming sense of dread.
The Australian couple, stranded in Dubai with their four-year-old twins, Phoebe and George, have had three flights home cancelled since September, and were waiting to find out if they would get bumped again from a flight out of the United Arab Emirates on January 27.
Martha Walkowsky, husband Brian Fisher, and twins Phoebe and George are stranded in the UAE.
On Friday they received "crushing" news: Emirates would immediately suspend all flights from Dubai to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.
"Devastation doesn't begin to describe it," Walkowsky said.
“This is the closest we have ever been to getting home and we really thought it was going to work. We keep walking around saying over and over 'what are we going to do?'.”
Fisher, 49, had been bracing for a cancellation notice. “We hate opening our emails in the morning – we are just holding each other, saying, 'Please not the [cancellation] email, please not the email'.”
“I’m not a crier, but I cry now in the bathroom,” adds Walkowsky. “My emotions sit right on the surface these days.”
Pressure builds on Andrews over borders, tennis 'double standard'
A story written across state lines by Noel Towell, Michael Fowler, Chip Le Grand, Mary Ward and Tom Rabe.
The state government continues to stand firm on its policy of preventing Victorians in COVID "red zones" of Sydney and Brisbane from returning home, despite growing criticism of its decision to welcome 1240 international arrivals from around the world for the Australian Open.
Premier Daniel Andrews this week.Credit:Jason South
Criticism from the state opposition, stranded families and the head of the nation's largest airline came as a leading infectious diseases expert said Australia's public health effort could "do without" the Open, predicting a 2 per cent COVID-positive rate among the 1240 people due to arrive in Melbourne for the event.
Qantas boss Alan Joyce added his voice to the calls for Victoria to relax its travel restrictions with Sydney and Brisbane, saying the continued preventing of Victorians from returning home, while allowing the tennis players from “countries where the virus is raging” to arrive, was "bizarre".
The Qantas chief executive said on Friday that his carrier and its budget arm Jetstar had cancelled almost 3000 flights between Melbourne and Sydney since the borders slammed shut on New Year's Eve.
“Behind each of those cancelled flights are a lot of people whose plans have been thrown up in the air,” he said in a written statement.
“Family they’re not going to see, events they’ll miss and homes they can’t get back to.”
On Thursday, American Tennys Sandgren was allowed to travel to Australia with his positive COVID-19 swab assessed as "viral shedding", while fellow players Andy Murray and Madison Keys were blocked from charter flights to Melbourne due to positive coronavirus diagnoses.
Victoria to get powerful Pfizer vaccine for vulnerable workers in weeks
By Chip Le Grand and Aisha Dow
The Victorian government is preparing a February 15 "V-Day" launch for the most potent COVID vaccine, with its newly formed local public health units to play a critical role in delivering the life-saving jab.
The DHHS plan is for phase one of the roll-out to deliver 15,000 doses a week of the Pfizer vaccine, with hospital staff and residents, people working in aged care facilities, quarantine and border workers among those first in line for inoculation.
Auslag Westling, a resident at a Swedish nursing home, gets the Pfizer-BioNtech COVID-19 vaccine on January 7.Credit:Getty Images
Phase two of the roll-out, slated to begin in mid-March, will administer the less effective but more readily available AstraZeneca to the broader population.
Victoria’s provisional time frame and dose targets for the Pfizer vaccine, contained in an internal briefing to a major hospital group obtained by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, is not confirmed by the Federal government, which is yet to set a start date for COVID vaccinations.
A spokesman for Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt said the roll-out of all vaccines remained contingent on regulatory approval by the Therapeutic Goods Administration and supply dates.
"No date has been set for a national rollout," the spokesman said. "This will depend on the approvals process and the subsequent confirmation of shipping dates, with final confirmation from the Commonwealth once these items have been determined.
'This is not a game': Global coronavirus death toll hits 2 million
By AP
The global death toll from COVID-19 has topped 2 million, crossing the threshold amid a vaccine rollout so immense but so uneven that in some countries there is real hope of vanquishing the outbreak, while in other, less-developed parts of the world, it seems a far-off dream.
The numbing figure was reached just over a year after the coronavirus was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The number of dead, compiled by Johns Hopkins University, is about equal to the population of Brussels, Mecca, Minsk or Vienna. It is roughly equivalent to the Cleveland metropolitan area or the entire state of Nebraska.
Cemetery workers carry the coffin of 89-year-old Abilio Ribeiro, who died of COVID-19, at a cemetery in Manaus, Brazil this month.Credit:AP
In wealthy countries including the United States, Britain, Israel, Canada and Germany, millions of citizens have already been given some measure of protection with at least one dose of vaccine developed with revolutionary speed and quickly authorised for use.
But elsewhere, immunisation drives have barely gotten off the ground. Many experts are predicting another year of loss and hardship in places like Iran, India, Mexico and Brazil, which together account for about a quarter of the world’s deaths.
“As a country, as a society, as citizens we haven’t understood,” lamented Israel Gomez, a Mexico City paramedic who spent months shuttling COVID-19 patients around by ambulance, desperately looking for vacant hospital beds. “We have not understood that this is not a game, that this really exists.”
Mexico, a country of 130 million people, has received just 500,000 doses of vaccine and has put barely half of those into the arms of healthcare workers.
Good morning
Good morning. I'm David Estcourt and thanks for joining us as we kick off our Saturday blog.
Here's a quick rundown of what happened yesterday:
- NSW, Victoria and Queensland recorded no locally acquired cases on Friday, but all three recorded two cases in returned travellers in hotel quarantine. SA has recorded one case in hotel quarantine.
- NSW Minister Andrew Constance said the Victorian government’s decision to push ahead with the Australian Open highlighted inconsistencies with their border restrictions.
- Health authorities in NSW have urged residents in Sydney's north, west and south-west, and Wollongong, to get tested for COVID-19 even if they have extremely mild symptoms, due to concerns the virus is still circulating in the community.
- Some of the world's best tennis players have arrived in Adelaide ahead of the Australian Open, with Serena Williams, Rafael Nadal, reigning champion Novak Djokovic and Naomi Osaka all starting their 14 days quarantine before the tournament begins in Melbourne on February 8.
- But it hasn't been smooth sailing for all Open hopefuls: Andy Murray and Madison Key were blocked from boarding flights to Australia after testing positive to COVID-19.
- Samples of sewage collected at seven south-east Queensland facilities have returned positive results for coronavirus fragments. Viral fragments were detected at wastewater treatment plants on Gibson Island in Brisbane's south; Luggage Point in Brisbane's north; Pimpama and Coombabah on the Gold Coast; Capalaba in Redland City, east of Brisbane; Wynnum in Brisbane's east; and Loganholme in Logan City, south of Brisbane.
- Qantas boss Alan Joyce has taken a swing at the Victorian government for keeping its border shut to NSW, saying it was both devastating and bizarre given it was letting in 1000 people from “countries where the virus is raging” for the Australian Open.
Vaccine industry experts have urged Australians not to panic about the limited supply of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine into Australia, arguing the government was always going to face stiff competition for doses.
Stick with us throughout today as the global COVID-19 death toll hits 2 million as anger over Victoria's borders as tennis players arrive
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2021-01-15 21:06:00Z
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