As it happened: Victoria records 149 COVID-19 cases as three Sydney schools close; Australian death toll jumps to 549

This is Rachael Dexter signing off.

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Stay safe, look after one another and goodnight.

Mr Abbott is in Italy and will return to London for a speech he is giving to next week to The Policy Exchange think tank, which is chaired by former foreign minister now High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer.

Mr Abbott will speak about the international response to the coronavirus pandemic.

He did not respond to questions from The Age and Sydney Morning Herald about the nature of his travel and why it warranted an exemption.

The Australian government has banned citizens from leaving the country and effectively locked out thousands of Australians trying to return home by imposing caps on the number of people who can return home in a single day and week.

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Dr Ford, who said she overall supported Premier Daniel Andrews and his handling of the pandemic, said she had written to MPs from a number of other parties and had received support for her campaign.

"It seems to be quite bipartisan which I'm happy about, I don't want this to be seen as an anti-government thing," she said.

Earlier this month The Age reported that another Melburnian was pushing for a New Zealand style "bubble" scheme for singles.

Even at the height of New Zealand’s lockdown, which in some ways was harsher than Melbourne’s stage four restrictions, people who lived alone were allowed to visit or stay at another residence under a so-called "shared bubble" arrangement.

"Specifically, if you live alone and have already established a bubble with another household, this can be maintained so long as both households have no contact with others – that they stay in their joint bubble," the New Zealand Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said in April.

Dr Ford said she hoped the Victorian Premier and Chief Health Officer might consider a "more equitable" stage three for singles once the state moves out of stage four restrictions in three weeks time.

"Explicitly allowing people living alone to visit each other would make a profound difference to our experience of this pandemic," she said.

"I just think that one cup of tea with a friend would be the thing that stop someone tipping over the edge."

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Cast your eye, again, to Europe. Consider your friends and family members in places like the UK, Germany, Italy and France who are allowed to travel right now, today, who can fly and catch trains and cross borders and have holidays and see relatives with few restrictions placed on them.

Some might have to self-quarantine on return, depending on their destination, and some might not. Most will have to socially distance themselves from others. Plenty will have to wear masks and take other precautions. That looks like a tentative "new normal", a way to function as a society while attempting to manage a global pandemic.

And now come back to Australia. State borders here are closed. International borders are closed. Australians aren't allowed out of the country unless permission is granted by Border Force. We're not even allowed interstate. And Australians based overseas aren't allowed back into their homeland unless they fit under the daily cap and can find an airfare that's lower than the price of a home mortgage.

I wrote last week about the international travel ban that Australians have been hit with, and my acceptance of the necessity of that. But since then I have been hit with an avalanche of emails from people in all sorts of situations, those with family overseas they would like to see, those with girlfriends or boyfriends or fiancées or other partners overseas – and plenty with loved ones who just live in another state in Australia. We don't just travel for pleasure, these people are saying, we travel for business, for duty, and for love.

And to those readers I say – yes, you have a point. A really good point.

So, what's going on here? We flattened the curve in Australia when we were called to do it. We bought ourselves time. When COVID-19 struck we banded together as a society to keep case numbers low and give everyone a fair chance. But now what are we doing?

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It is only in the past week – now in stage four – that those numbers have started to come down sharply. The team of epidemiologists who supply COVID-19 modelling to the federal government suspect a link between disadvantage, virus spread and the need to travel to work.

"The logic makes sense," says Associate Professor Nick Golding, head of the team advising the government and an epidemic modeller at Curtin University. "Lockdown measures target contacts that can be avoided by people working from home, and non-household contacts. If the majority of a person's contacts are in the household or in a job that can't be done remotely, then a lockdown would be expected to have less effect on their transmission potential."

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