A summary of the major developments in the coronavirus outbreak across Australia

This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

Good evening, and welcome to our daily roundup of the latest developments on the coronavirus pandemic in Australia. This is Calla Wahlquist with the main stories on Saturday 11 April.

Australian travellers to arrive home

More than 1,200 Australians are expected to land at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport this weekend, with flights from Peru, India and Uruguay.

The flight from Uruguay is bringing home passengers of the Antarctic cruise ship Greg Mortimer.

Victoria’s deputy chief health officer, Dr Annaliese van Diemen, said the Victorian and commonwealth governments had “reports that up to 70% of these patients have tested positive to Covid-19”.

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Australia’s deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, said the “entire operation has been meticulously planned”.

The returning passengers will be medically screened, tested for Covid-19 if necessary, and transported by Victorian authorities to hotels to undergo 14 days of mandatory isolation.

New Zealanders on the flight will board a second charter flight home.

An emergency medical officer team will be on standby to assess all passengers as the international flights come in, and paramedics will also be on hand to take passengers to hospital if necessary.

Australia’s death toll rises to 56

The death toll in Australia has reached 56, with two more deaths – a 91-year-old woman in New South Wales, and a man in his 80s in Victoria – reported on Saturday.

However, the daily case numbers have stabilised or fallen in Queensland, NSW and Victoria, the states with the largest number of cases from community transmission.

Meanwhile the Tasmanian premier, Peter Gutwein, said authorities would “ring-fence” health facilities in Burnie after an outbreak among health workers at the North West regional hospital spread to the North West private hospital.

Healthcare workers, their households and any patient who was discharged from either facility from 27 March onwards has been asked to self-quarantine at their homes.

“Ring-fencing is what we need to do, and ring-fencing is what we are going to do,” Gutwein said.

More closures due to crowds at Bondi

The popular Bondi to Bronte coastal walk in Sydney has been closed by the local council, with fines for those who ignore newly erected barriers at entry points, because large crowds were continuing to visit the area despite orders to stay home.

Bondi is a hotspot for Covid-19 and people have been advised to exercise elsewhere.

“Unfortunately, closing the coastal walk was the only way the council could help ensure that public health orders could be maintained along the walk,” the Waverley mayor, Paula Masselos, said.

“I appreciate that this temporary closure will be met with frustration from some residents. I also appreciate how important it is for people to be able to exercise for mental health. I encourage people to be a tourist in their own suburb and find places to exercise on other streets and parks.”

‘Nuanced approach’ to lifting restrictions

Coatsworth said Australia needed to take a “nuanced” approach to reducing the restrictions imposed to stop the spread of coronavirus.

His comments came as experts warned against a quick reversal of restrictions.

“I think another way to put it might be that it was very fast into the restrictions and they were very widespread, and it needs to be very nuanced on the way out,” Coatsworth said.

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“So you need to be very clear about if you’re lifting a restriction, that you have done everything you can to try and understand exactly what the implications of that lifting would be before you actually implemented it.”

NRL says it could restart season ‘tomorrow’

The NRL has written permission to resume its season and has been specifically exempted from public health orders, meaning it could, if it chose, resume as planned on 28 May, the Australian Rugby League Commission chairman, Peter V’landys, said.

“In reality we could do it tomorrow if we wanted to, but we’re not going to because we’re going to let the infection rate continue its stabilisation,” V’landys told Nine newspapers.

The NSW health minister, Brad Hazzard, who reportedly got a call from V’landys on Friday reminding him of the league’s apparent exemption from the public health orders, said the decision to resume the season would not be made by politicians.

“It’s a ‘have a discussion with health authorities to see if it can be done safely’ [scenario],” he said.

The Australian Health Protection Principal Committee’s position was to “have an approach which covers all codes”, Coatsworth said. “And I think at this point in time it is that we don’t have training and we don’t have matches and we keep social distancing, which is the object of not having sporting events.”

Coronavirus detected at Queensland mine site

The Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has raised concerns about employee safety on a BHP mine site in central Queensland, after the mining company announced late on Friday that a worker at its Blackwater mine had tested positive to the virus.

That employee had not been on site since 1 April, BHP said.

CFMEU Mining and Energy Queensland’s president, Stephen Smyth, said the union had received minimal information about the positive test and was concerned about “multiple points of potential cross-contamination including machinery, transport, mess facilities and camp accommodation”.

BHP said its medical team took the temperatures of all onsite workers overnight “and no abnormal temperatures were returned”.