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Melbourne bureau-chief Melissa Davey here with you for the next eight hours or so bringing you the latest developments. You can contact me at melissa.davey@theguardian.com or on Twitter.

Here in Australia the Victorian government will soon reveal more details about event cancellations following the cancellation of the Grand Prix on Friday. For the first time in almost a century, Sydney’s Royal Easter Show has been cancelled.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee has issued a statement saying “the time has come to put in place social distancing measures to mitigate spread, rather than a strategy based primarily on case finding”. These measures include:

Limiting non-essential organised gatherings to fewer than 500 people

Limiting non-essential meetings or conferences of critical workforce eg healthcare professionals and emergency services

Encouraging all Australians to exercise personal responsibility for social distancing measures

Initiating measures to protect vulnerable populations, such as reducing visitors to all residential care facilities and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities

However schools, universities and shopping centres are not included in the ban.

Australian Medical Association president Dr Tony Bartone said the evidence around schools “can be somewhat difficult to interpret clearly, and we need to be understanding and follow the evidence in that respect”.

So we will work with, again with the Chief Medical Officer and the other health officers to ensure the timeliness of that. Clearly, where there’s been an outbreak in... the school it’s appropriate that certain schools will be put into quarantine during that time. However, as we get deeper into the evolving pandemic response and effects, we will have to work with the best possible evidence. If we do nothing, if we turn a blind eye, our public hospital system will be overrun, and that is not in the interest of anyone in our community at all.

On Saturday morning the president of the Australian Primary Principals Association, Malcolm Elliott, told the ABC that “some schools are a little more advanced than others” in their preparation. He said;