Key posts
A summary of the day
That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Here’s a summary of today’s events:
- Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiled new modelling showing vaccinating younger people would be the most effective strategy to slow down virus outbreaks.
- NSW recorded 199 locally acquired cases of COVID-19. At least 50 were in the community during their infectious period. New data shows which pockets of the city have the highest and lowest vaccination rates.
- Queensland reported 16 new local cases, the majority linked to Brisbane schools. People in the state’s south-east will be in lockdown until the weekend. A new case in Cairns was confirmed this evening.
- Victoria recorded four new cases, all linked to known outbreaks and in isolation for their infectious period. Premier Daniel Andrews returned to Parliament for the first time since his back injury in March.
- The head of the Victorian royal commission into Crown casino says the company would be getting away with criminality if it was allowed to continue running its Melbourne casino unhindered.
- The Reserve Bank kept interest rates on hold at record-low levels.
We’ll be back early tomorrow. Take care and goodnight.
Drive-through vaccination clinics to be piloted from September
By Cassandra Morgan
The federal government has flagged drive-through COVID vaccination clinics will start popping up across the country from mid-September.
Plans for an accelerated national COVID-19 vaccine campaign, led by Australia’s vaccine rollout co-ordinator Lieutenant General John Frewen, were released on Tuesday.
According to the document, drive-through clinics, which may include stadium carparks, “have been prioritised to enable the vaccination of people aged 30 years and above”, and to support vaccination efforts in regional and rural areas.
The drive-through clinics are scheduled to start taking shape in mid-August, with the first pilots due to start operating in mid-September.
The clinics are expected to start operating at scale in most jurisdictions by mid-October, however, “not all jurisdictions will be able to support this channel”.
Meanwhile, the plan also flagged the piloting of workplace vaccination in mid-October, before being introduced across most jurisdictions by late November along with vaccination clinics at retail hubs.
School COVID vaccination programs could start in early December.
Analysis: How do we know vaccines won’t have long-term safety risks?
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald’s science reporter Liam Mannix says he keeps getting asked the same questions over and over again when it comes to vaccines: have we tested them for long enough?
And how do we really know they are going to be safe, long term?
It seems like a compelling point. The first vaccine trials started about 16 months ago. Sure, we can be confident in their short-term safety … but how do we know in a decade or two we’re not going to start turning into horrifying lizard creatures?
The answers are surprising, and you can read up on them in his full story here.
Lockdowns spark city exodus as thousands head to the hills
By Shane Wright and Jennifer Duke
Sydneysiders are abandoning the city in favour of cheaper housing and lockdown-free life in the state’s regions as the coronavirus pandemic up-ends migration around the country.
A record net 11,800 people left the nation’s capital cities in the three months to the end of March, the Australian Bureau of Statistics reported on Tuesday, with Sydney and Melbourne hit hardest by the pandemic-fuelled drain.
Since the start of the pandemic, a net 24,500 people have left Sydney for other parts of NSW. In total, almost 40,000 have moved out of Sydney since the pandemic started, with more than 10 per cent making the move to Brisbane.
But there are signs of change. In the first three months of this year, NSW gained a net 880 people from Victoria – the first time since the middle of 2017. But it lost people to every other state or territory.
Global vaccine drive in poor countries struggles to compete amid shortages
By Benjamin Mueller and Rebecca Robbins
Deaths from COVID-19 were surging across Africa in June when 100,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrived in Chad. The delivery seemed proof that the United Nations-backed program to immunise the world could get the most desirable vaccines to the least developed nations. Yet five weeks later, Chad’s health minister said, 94,000 doses remained unused.
Nearby in Benin, only 267 shots were being given each day, a pace so slow that 110,000 of the program’s AstraZeneca doses expired. Across Africa, at least nine countries are at risk of having doses spoil this summer.
The vaccine pile-up illustrates one of the most serious but largely unrecognised problems facing the immunisation program as it tries to recover from months of missteps: difficulty getting doses from airport tarmacs into people’s arms.
A shipment of COVAX AstraZeneca arrives in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Many poorer nations struggle to store and ship the doses they receive. Credit:Getty
Known as COVAX, the program was supposed to be a global powerhouse, a multibillion-dollar alliance of international health bodies and non-profits that would ensure through sheer buying power that poor countries received vaccines as quickly as the rich.
Instead, COVAX has struggled to acquire doses: it stands half a billion short of its goal. Poor countries are dangerously unprotected as the Delta variant runs rampant, just the scenario that COVAX was created to prevent.
Builders say Sydney suburban lockdowns halting $6b worth of projects
By Megan Gorrey
Builders have warned projects worth up to a combined $6 billion have ground to a halt in Sydney as thousands of construction workers from eight council areas across the city’s western suburbs remain under strict lockdown.
More than 70,000 workers and tradespeople in COVID-19 hotspots from Parramatta to Campbelltown cannot attend work despite the NSW government lifting its two-week ban on some building sites over the weekend.
Building projects in western Sydney remain shut down due to the state’s coronavirus crisis. Credit:Nick Moir
Master Builders Association executive director Brian Seidler estimated work on projects worth a combined $5 billion to $6 billion had stopped in those areas where the construction ban still applied, including Fairfield, Liverpool, Canterbury-Bankstown, Cumberland, Blacktown, Parramatta, Georges River and Campbelltown.
“We’ve got some real, real problems, particularly in the commercial sector. I think there’s a bit of desperation starting to seep into a resilient industry. I think we’re going to hit the wall within two weeks,” Mr Seidler said.
Australian men’s cricket team’s first broadcast blackout since 1994
By Malcolm Conn and Daniel Brettig
The Australian men’s cricket team faces its first total television blackout in 27 years after Fox Sports rejected the rights to Australia’s T20 series of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh cricket sources, who declined to be named because they are not authorised to comment, said the series would not be shown in Australia on any platform following the failure of Fox Sports to agree to terms.
The first of five T20 clashes will be played in Dhaka tonight at 10pm.
The Bangladesh source claimed that the series was offered to all Australian networks including Fox Sports and was flatly rejected without a discussion around the rights fee.
“Not one dollar was discussed,” the source claimed.
A Foxtel spokesman confirmed Fox Sports would not be showing the series but denied the claim of no financial negotiations, and said that rights fees were discussed.
It is the first time since the 1994 Test series in Pakistan – Mark Taylor’s first as captain – that an overseas international series has not been telecast in Australia, further highlighting the further tightening of the sports rights market.
Cairns COVID case confirmed as active
By Cloe Read
An alert has been issued for contact tracing locations in far north Queensland after health authorities confirmed they were investigating a new case of COVID-19 in Cairns.
Late today, authorities confirmed the case was active, not historic.
A public health alert was issued for a flight from Brisbane to Cairns on Thursday, July 29, as well as several locations around Cairns, Trinity Beach and Yorkeys Knob.
The case is the first in the region after the Queensland lockdown was announced on Saturday, and the furthest the coronavirus has spread in the state.
The department said the circumstances around the case were still being investigated and testing capacity was being increased in the region.
Victoria has done a great job doling out AstraZeneca: PM
By Cassandra Morgan
Prime Minister Scott Morrison says Victoria has done a “great job” doling out the AstraZeneca vaccine through its state-run hubs, as he spruiks the nation’s four-step path towards no more COVID lockdowns.
Mr Morrison spoke to Tom Elliott on 3AW’s Drive program this afternoon, and denied the suggestion young people were being told to get Pfizer, not AstraZeneca.
He said there’s been nothing to suggest Australia won’t meet its vaccination targets of 70 per cent and then 80 per cent because of vaccine hesitancy.
“In the last 24 hours, almost 10,000 people under the age of 40 took AstraZeneca,” Mr Morrison said.
“Victoria has done a great job with AstraZeneca going through their state hubs. They’ve been one of our best performing in the state hubs with AstraZeneca, but the biggest performer on AstraZeneca has been the GPs and with more pharmacists coming online now, that’s how we get the job done.”
He said the nearly 10,000 young people going and getting the AstraZeneca vaccine “says to me … that Australians want to get this done”.
“They know where we want to get to … at 80 per cent, those who are vaccinated can travel, they can come back, we won’t have to have these costly lockdowns,” Mr Morrison said.
He said there was no need Labor’s suggestion of cash incentives to be introduced to encourage people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Melbourne’s Crown casino could be taken over, royal commissioner says
By Paul Sakkal
The head of the Victorian royal commission into Crown casino says the company would be getting away with criminality if it was allowed to continue running its Melbourne casino unhindered.
Crown Resorts announced its Melbourne chief executive Xavier Walsh would step down half an hour before commissioner Ray Finkelstein, QC, began the final hearings of the months-long probe that has uncovered illegal behaviour. Crown’s lawyer said on Tuesday it “accepts” the findings and “apologises” for them.
Xavier Walsh, left, leaving the royal commission last month.Credit:Eamon Gallagher
Mr Finkelstein, who referenced the possibility of another company taking over the casino, questioned submissions made by Crown’s lawyers urging him to allow the casino to continue with an independent monitor to oversee governance reforms and help the company return to being an acceptable casino operator.
While Crown conceded Mr Finkelstein would be within his rights to find the company “unsuitable”, the casino’s lawyers argued cancelling or suspending the licence would cause it to default on loans, cost thousands of jobs, harm Victoria’s economic recovery and deprive the state government of revenue.
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2021-08-03 12:12:27Z
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