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As it happened: Victoria records 15 COVID-19 cases as US death toll surpasses 200,000; Australia secures COVAX agreement as nation's death toll jumps to 859

Updated September 23, 2020 — 7:43pm,first published September 23, 2020 — 6:58am

Summary

Victoria has recorded 15 new coronavirus cases today and five further deaths from the virus. Melbourne's 14-day average has dropped to 29.4.
Six new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in New South Wales, all of them among people in hotel quarantine. The state has recorded no new locally-transmitted cases for the second day in a row.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed in Victoria against two private security companies involved in the state's hotel quarantine program.
No new coronavirus cases have been confirmed in Queensland today, and the number of active cases in the state has dropped to five.
The number of coronavirus deaths in the United States has passed 200,000. Worldwide there have been more than 31 million COVID-19 cases and 966,000 deaths, Johns Hopkins University data shows.

7.43pm on Sep 23, 2020

Recapping today's events

Thank you for joining us for our live coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic on Wednesday, September 23. Log on to follow Thursday's news here.

Here are Wednesday's key developments:

Victorian recorded 15 new cases, about half of which were linked to either nursing homes or hospitals. Premier Daniel Andrew confirmed more restrictions will be eased this weekend, beyond those he had previously flagged, after declaring the state was winning the battle against coronavirus.
Six new coronavirus cases were recorded in NSW, all among people in hotel quarantine. Queensland recorded no new cases.
Senior Andrews government ministers admitted they had little or no knowledge of key decisions about the ill-fated hotel quarantine program until after they were made.
Lawyers defending the Andrews government against a court challenge to Victoria's curfew policy said they intended to withhold key documents that revealed why a senior government official made the call to extend the curfew.
More than 31.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 969,578 deaths have been reported across abut 219 countries and regions.
26,973 confirmed cases in Australia and 859 deaths
More than 7.3 million tests have been conducted for COVID-19 in Australia.

6.57pm on Sep 23, 2020

Safe for NSW to open up to regional Victoria, experts say

By Benjamin Preiss and Emma Anvari

Two leading epidemiologists say other states can safely reopen their borders with regional Victoria while Melbourne remains locked down to prevent coronavirus spreading beyond the city.

The rolling 14-day case average has dropped to 1.1 in regional Victoria, with no new cases since a single infection was reported on September 17.

Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett said the risk of a major outbreak was now "incredibly low" in regional Victoria.

Professor Catherine Bennett, the chair of epidemiology at Deakin University. Jason South

"I think there is no epidemiological argument now to keep those restrictions [with NSW]," she said.

Professor Bennett said the many weeks of lockdown and the fact there had been no cases recently in Geelong, despite its proximity to Melbourne, showed regional Victoria had done well in minimising the spread of the virus.

"It's unlikely there is now underlying community transmission in regional Victoria because of the length of the lockdown," she said.

Professor Bennett said strong infection-prevention habits in Victoria and improved outbreak responses should give authorities confidence about planning to open up.

In total, regional Victoria has just 14 active cases, including five in the Colac Otway Shire and two each in Greater Geelong and Macedon Ranges.

There were six new cases in NSW in the 24 hours to 8pm on Tuesday night – all of them returned travellers in hotel quarantine.

6.38pm on Sep 23, 2020

Andrews and Mikakos to front inquiry from tomorrow

The Victorian hotel quarantine inquiry will this week hear from arguably the state's two most important figures in its pandemic response, Premier Daniel Andrews and Health Minister Jenny Mikakos.

Ms Mikakos will appear on Thursday and Mr Andrews will appear from 2.15pm on Friday. They are the final two witnesses before the inquiry hears closing submissions on Monday.

Today, Jobs Minister and Martin Pakula and Police and Emergency Services Minister Lisa Neville shed little light on the decision to use private security.

Ms Neville said the prospect of using guards was first raised with her by Emergency Management Commissioner Andrew Crisp in a key meeting with then-police chief Graham Ashton. Ms Crisp has previously claimed he did not recollect mentioning private security to Ms Neville, one of many claims of poor memory by ministers, public servants police during the inquiry.

With many key details as clear as mud, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald will be carrying live blogs both Thursday and Friday for what could be pivotal evidence.

Here's a wrap of today's evidence.

6.12pm on Sep 23, 2020

'Imperfect agreement': Unions and employers end months of talks with no deal

By Nick Bonyhady

The federal government's industrial relations working groups have gone into overtime after they failed to reach a major compromise during months of scheduled talks.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison unveiled the talks in May with the aim of simplifying Australia's often complex and acrimonious industrial system to make it easier for businesses to hire staff and help the economy recover from the pandemic.

Attorney-General Christian Porter said the government would try to legislate its preferred ideas from the working groups.Alex Ellinghausen

Attorney-General Christian Porter is now conducting informal talks with select unions and employers in the hopes of getting agreements over the line after formal discussions ended on Friday without clear consensus.

If the last-minute talks do not get agreement among the parties, Mr Porter said the government would take ideas from each working group and "try and build them into a product that can A) grow jobs and B) make its way through Parliament".

"There's a lot of agreement around the problems," Mr Porter, who is also industrial relations minister, said on Perth radio. "There's imperfect agreement around solutions."

Some working groups got close to agreement. Among them was one trying to manage the fallout from landmark court decisions giving casuals with regular, predictable hours annual leave and other entitlements reserved for permanent workers, which could cost businesses $40 billion.

Read the full story here.

5.54pm on Sep 23, 2020

Opinion: Why Melburnians will dine out(doors) and love it

By Gemima Cody

Many valid issues have been raised about Melbourne's proposed outdoor dining scheme, announced last week by the state government and Melbourne City Council. The weather is risky; access to pavement space is not equal for all and if we're using car parks, where will we park?

Some opinions have been raised that are not so valid. Like the one proffered last week by retired critic Stephen Downes that proper sophisticates' tastebuds wither when outdoors. Downes posited that while it is acceptable to consume sandwiches, coffee and vanilla slices outdoors, next to freeways or in country towns, "Melburnians are considerably more sophisticated. We eat out indoors to revel in flavours and textures. We don't want our coqs au vin and massaman curries to get cold and corrupted."

Outdoor dining is set to be a feature of Victoria's summer.The Age

We can laugh (and we did) but now we've thoroughly aired the downsides, it's time to get behind an alfresco summer – because it's coming, like it or not.

First of all, as far as cold, corrupted coqs au vin go, we have just spent the past six months eating restaurant dishes not mere metres, but many kilometres from their kitchens of origin, either tipped onto plates from compostable containers or finished in pans that we have to wash.

I had to check whether the outdoor naysayers were right. Maybe there are restaurant critic secrets I hadn't been made privy to – knowledge that a dish taken outside is as undone as a maiden who hath lost her virtue.

I picked up two cooked pastas from Tipo 00 (the Little Bourke Street pasta bar whose outdoor plans are well under way) and drove them 10 minutes home. Then I ate half of my saffron spaghettini (still springy, heavily loaded with crab and interwoven with zucchini maintaining bite), and ridged rigatoni (featuring pork and fennel sausage, nicely embittered with radicchio) in my kitchen, and the rest on the footpath outside.

Read the full piece by food writer Gemima Cody here.

5.46pm on Sep 23, 2020

Rudd backs Andrews, lashes media treatment of Labor leader

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd says Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has done a "really good job" in his government's pandemic response and criticised what he called unfair media coverage of the state Labor leader.

Mr Rudd said critics of Mr Andrews were attempting to hold him personally accountable for failures in the hotel quarantine scheme that were not within his control.

"What the media have comprehensively failed to understand is what it's like to be in the hot seat," Mr Rudd said on ABC radio.

"Against all the measures of what's possible and not possible, I think Dan Andrews has done a really good job.

"It reminds me very much of when I was prime minister and the Liberals then attacked me and held me personally accountable and responsible for the tragic deaths of four young men who were killed in the roll-out of the home insulation program as a consequence of a failure of contractors to adhere to state-based ... standards.

"When people start waving the finger at a head of government and saying "you, Dan Andrews, are responsible for the second shift at 2 o'clock in the morning at hotel facility X", [it] frankly doesn't pass the common sense test."

Mr Rudd said coverage by News Corporation mastheads the Herald Sun and The Australian was particularly unfair on Mr Andrews. He said the News Corporation tabloid papers' coverage of Liberal premiers in NSW and SA was "chalk and cheese" when compared to Labor premiers in Victoria and Queensland.

"They are rags," he said.

5.25pm on Sep 23, 2020

Princess Cruises' Sun Princess and Sea Princess sold, Australian cruises cancelled

By Craig Platt

All sailings of the Princess Cruises ships Sun Princess and Sea Princess for this summer and next year have been cancelled after the cruise line announced both ships would be sold.

The ships are two of 18 to be sold by Carnival Corp, the parent company of Princess Cruises along with the Costa and Carnival cruise lines.

Princess Cruises said in a statement that due to the imminent departure of the ships from the line's fleet, all scheduled sailings for Sun Princess from December 23 through to August 14 next year and for Sea Princess from December 23 through to November 9 next year are cancelled. Fifty-five cruises from Australia are now cancelled, along with 14 other international sailings.

The company did not disclose the buyer for the two ships.

5.00pm on Sep 23, 2020

Sweden considers restrictions as COVID-19 cases rise

Malmo: Sweden's public health agency is discussing imposing new coronavirus restrictions on Stockholm after the city's health chief warned of "worrying signs of increasing infection".

It came shortly after Björn Eriksson, Stockholm's health chief, said the long decline in cases in the city had ended.

"The downwards trend is broken," he said. "We can only hope this is a blip, that the spread starts decreasing again." According to the Public Health Agency, 1200 new cases and five deaths have been reported since Friday, a sharp increase on the average of 200 cases a day in recent weeks.

Sweden, which chose to keep most schools, restaurants, bars, offices and shopping centres open throughout the pandemic, has suffered one of the highest death rates in Europe, at 580 per million - just behind the UK and Italy. Its rate is 10 times more than Norway and five times more than Denmark. More than 5850 people have died from COVID-19 in Sweden from nearly 90,000 cases.

The strategy emphasising personal responsibility rather than major lockdowns to slow the virus drew fierce criticism as deaths shot up during the northern spring, but has also been lauded by World Health Organisation officials as a sustainable model.

Cases appeared to be rising among people in their 40s and 50s, and secondary school students, according to the state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell. But in Stockholm, the spread was among a wider population, he added.

Read the full story here.

4.45pm on Sep 23, 2020

'Late to the party': Keating says RBA is failing the unemployed in scathing assessment

By Shane Wright

Former prime minister Paul Keating has savaged the Reserve Bank for failing the nation's unemployed and dragging its feet to help the economy out of the coronavirus recession, likening it to a self-proclaimed deity.

Mr Keating, treasurer when the country went into recession in 1990-91 as the Reserve Bank took official interest rates beyond 17 per cent, said the RBA was so afraid of breaking central banking orthodoxy that it was hindering the Morrison government's effort to protect those forced out of work.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating says the RBA has become a self-appointed deity, too worried about central bank orthodoxy and not enough about the plight of the nation's unemployed.Louis Douvis and Peter Braig

It follows an address this week by RBA deputy governor Guy Debelle in which he outlined a string of options the bank was considering to help the economy out of recession.

Markets now expect the bank to take the official cash rate to 0.1 per cent, from 0.25 per cent, on October 6 just hours before Treasurer Josh Frydenberg releases the 2020-21 budget.

The bank is extending a line of credit worth up to $200 billion to commercial banks while buying more than $50 billion government bonds on the secondary market to bring down the interest rates on this debt.

But Mr Keating, who as treasurer saw its conversion to an independent central bank, said the RBA's own charter required it to focus on full employment and price stability.

He said with inflation so low "one would need a microscope" to find it, the bank should be buying "mountainous" amounts of public debt that would enable governments to properly fund an economic recovery.

"The bank should be explicitly supporting the government so the country does not experience a massive fall in employment – impacting particularly on younger workers – those who have already been obliged to wipe out their superannuation savings to support themselves," he said in an opinion piece for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

4.41pm on Sep 23, 2020

European airlines implement test-before-flying scheme

European airlines are pinning hopes on pre-flight COVID-19 tests that deliver results as fast as pregnancy tests to help restore passengers' confidence in taking to the skies in confined spaces with shared air.

Germany's Lufthansa, at the mercy of government bailouts for survival, is in talks with Swiss drugmaker Roche over deploying so-called antigen tests, according to two people familiar with the discussions, as the airline aims to make them available next month.

Italian operator Alitalia, meanwhile, told Reuters that from Wednesday it would add two flights from Milan to Rome, to the two it is already offering from Rome to Milan, exclusively for passengers with negative tests.

A Lufthansa crew member holds a high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) cabin filter as the airline and airport operator Fraport AG, showcase new coronavirus safety measures at Frankfurt Airport in Germany.Bloomberg

The tests are administered by health authorities at the airports and included in ticket prices. If they prove popular and safe, these antigen-tested flights will be expanded to more domestic, and later international, routes, the airline said.

Unlike laboratory-based molecular tests that have been the staple of health authorities in the pandemic, antigen tests do not require machines to process. Much like pregnancy tests, they can produce results in about 15 minutes.

However the tests require an uncomfortable nasal swab and are not as accurate as the molecular, or PCR, tests. They generally produce more "false negatives" which could mean sick people could slip through the cracks and onto planes.

An increasing number are hitting the market, from companies such as Abbott Laboratories, Becton Dickinson & Co and Quidel Corp and Roche, which is rebranding antigen tests from South Korea's privately held SD Biosensor.

Airlines are pressing governments to embrace alternatives to blanket travel restrictions amid a resurgence of COVID-19 cases in Europe.

Rapid antigen tests that can be administered by non-medical staff are expected to become available in coming weeks for as little as $7 each, the head of industry body the International Air Transport Association said on Tuesday.

Despite the drawbacks of such antigen tests, carriers hope they could tip the balance in convincing people to fly.

"It is to give ... confidence, at a specific point in time, that the result is positive or negative," said Christian Paulus, a Roche research and development manager.

"The PCR remains the gold standard. Therefore if there are any questions open, or if the clinical appearance of the person who had a negative test, if the person has symptoms like a fever, then you would for sure do confirmatory testing."

Alitalia launched its "COVID Tested Flights" programme from Rome to Milan last week, and will expand it from Wednesday. Only passengers with negative COVID-19 results can board.

"So far no positive passengers have been found," said an Alitalia spokesman, adding that many chose to take the airline's antigen tests the night before the flight. Travellers can access airport-testing facilities via a preferred lane with their tickets.

Reuters