World 11.9 million Brazil 1.6 million India 740K+
After months of downplaying and denying the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil’s President, Jair Bolsonaro, has tested positive for coronavirus. Apparently he is not concerned by the diagnosis. I wonder if he will feel the same in a week or two.
The spread of COVID-19 across Melbourne has dramatically worsened. It’s a really difficult situation to manage. In an effort to contain it spreading interstate, the Victoria-NSW border has now been closed. Flights between Sydney and Melbourne have been significantly reduced, further impacting the aviation industry. But there are 55 land crossing points to monitor. Permits are being issued for border town communities like Albury-Wodonga, and many others, to facilitate community movement. If truck movements are held up, this will create a huge problem affecting the delivery of goods and essential supplies. It’s a logistics nightmare and it’s probably not going to stop the spread of the virus, given the number of people who will still be travelling across the border with permits. There have already been a few cases diagnosed in NSW, including in Albury over the past few days. One suggestion I heard mentioned which could make life easier in border towns, would be to move the checkpoint north of the border, so that those in Albury and Wodonga and other border towns could access local services on either side of the river, but nothing is easy to organise in this pandemic.
There were another 134 cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Victoria overnight. There are now 860 active cases and most are from community transmission, with no known source.
I’ve been wondering about the COVID safe app that over six million Australians downloaded. It was meant to assist with contact tracing, but yesterday I heard in one news report that so far it hasn’t performed any better than the manual tracing.