Birx says federal health experts recommend bar closures in Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana and Virginia; Spain’s Covid-19 deaths could be 60% higher; Global deaths near 650,000. Follow the latest updates
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Back in Australia, Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews said he will look at closing certain key industries if the workplace transmission of coronavirus is not slowed.
But he said his health advisors have not recommend taking that step at this stage.
If we were to continue to see outbreaks, if we were to continue to see people quite obviously attending work when they shouldn’t be, then every option becomes on the table. And that’s not the position at the moment and I’m very grateful to those employers and they’re not the only high-risk sites. We shouldn’t single them out to the exclusion of others. It’s not just cool stores, meat works, abattoirs, whatever you want to term them, it’s not just big warehouses, distribution, freight, logistic centres, there’s lot of different sites, aged care, healthcare, the list goes on.
But... You know, next steps may well have to include closing a number of these industries if we continue to see people attending work.
So employers have got, business owners have got, a really big stake in this also. We have to work together to keep anyone who’s got symptoms away from work. Otherwise businesses will have to close and the thing is this: When you have an outbreak, that business will shut, they’ll be the subject of deep-cleaning, they’ll be the subject of literally of hundreds of thousands of hours of public health team work, contact-tracing, testing, all of that.
There’s an economic cost to that, there’s a very significant public health cost also. So that work is not just me standing here asking people to do it. It’s got to be enterprise by enterprise workplace by workplace and I’m really confident that they are stepping up to do that work with us because they need to.
The Times of India reports that India’s one-day case total was higher than 50,000 for the first time on Sunday, taking the country’s total to 1.4m cases – the third highest worldwide.
50,362 new cases were reported, toppling the previous one-day case record of 49,055.
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