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Deadline Warns (Daniel Andrews) has a lot of really interesting anagrams that you can look up, or play at home to pass the time while in lockdown. It seems that just about everyone in Melbourne tunes in to his telecasts on the ABC News Channel each day to get his daily updates. He is doing an exceptional job and I feel confident we will get to the other side of this if we all play our part. Everyone has to do their bit, hard as it is.
Today the Premier announced that there were a further 439 cases diagnosed in the past 24 hours in Victoria, a similar number to yesterday. There were around 21,000 tests, so this is an infection rate of about 2 percent. There were another 11 fatalities overnight. 456 people are in hospital.
He also announced increased penalties for those who are not complying with health directives and stay at home orders.
Sir Scott Moron has announced the federal government will introduce a ‘disaster payment’ for Victorians who have no paid sick leave. He could have done this months ago for casual workers, but didn’t. This paid pandemic leave isn’t available to other Australians, only Victorians. ‘Pocket thinking’ strikes once again. The only businesses not affected by Stage Four are newsagents, post offices, supermarkets and other grocery stores, such as butchers and bakers, pharmacies, petrol stations and bottle shops. Everything else in Melbourne will partly, or fully close for the next six weeks. Essentially this shutdown is similar to what they did in New Zealand from the start of the pandemic, and I hope we get the same result. I suspect that it might have to run a bit longer than six weeks, but this time around I think we have a real opportunity to hopefully eliminate COVID-19.