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If you suspect you or a family member has coronavirus you should call (not visit) your GP or ring the national Coronavirus Health Information Hotline on 1800 020 080.
This concludes our rolling coverage for the Easter long weekend.
Thank you for sticking with us. From all of us at WAtoday, we hope you managed to have a happy Easter.
We will continue our live coverage tomorrow and bring you the latest updates locally, nationally and internationally as they happen.
Stay safe, take care of one another, wash your hands and continue to practise social distancing.
Getting people home from interstate or overseas is part of a national and international humanitarian effort with airlines needing to 'step up', says Western Australia Health Minister Roger Cook.
Mr Cook said underwriting flights were something each of the state governments were looking at and working together on to find a solution.
He said police commissioners and their teams were currently finding out how many people were in each domestic city and how to best get them home.
Mr Cook said there were hundreds of West Australians in the eastern states wanting to get back to the state, while there were more than 600 people from the eastern states currently in WA needing to get back home.
Western Australia Health Minister Roger Cook expects the problematic Artania cruise ship will set sail in five days despite four of the state’s latest recorded cases are linked to the vessel.
The ship is still under its two week quarantine period but Mr Cook said it was still scheduled to depart WA waters on Saturday.
“I expect that ship to sail in five days time with the remaining crew on board, having then served out their 14 days isolation from all the other crew members,” he said.
“The remaining crews should all have got through this particular issue without being exposed to the disease.”
Around 55 Australians in cyclone ravaged Vanuatu have been airlifted by the Australian Defence Force, and will arrive in Brisbane tonight.
The C-17 Hercules aircraft - returning to Australia from delivering aid supplies in the wake of Cyclone Harold, carried the passengers, all wearing face masks.
The returning Australians, who were living and working all over the Pacific Island nation, will be in quarantine for the next two weeks in Brisbane.
Vanuatu as yet, has no reported cases of COVID-19.
A Qantas Dreamliner has landed at London's Heathrow Airport ahead of Wednesday's first mercy flight, carrying Australians stranded in the UK home.Australia's high commissioner to the UK George Brandis urged anyone in the UK wanting to get back, to book now.'
Skippy the Qantas 787 has landed in London!' Brandis said.
The Government-subsided mercy flights are operating until May 6.
They were arranged after airlines, including Qantas, grounded fleet due to international travel restrictions imposed by governments around the world.
Reliance on the private market to develop vaccines has failed, leaving us vulnerable to pandemics such as COVID-19, public health experts say.
The Age revealed on Sunday at least three SARS vaccines that may have prevented COVID-19 were cut off from funding as they were about to go into clinical trials.
Meanwhile, the global coalition spearheading the race towards a COVID-19 vaccine warns it is running out of funding.
Vaccines are far more expensive to develop and produce than other drugs, and many of the potential customers are the global poor, making big pharma companies reluctant to invest.
The federal government is considering underwriting domestic flights operated by Qantas and Virgin Australia to maintain air links between capital cities, following sharp capacity cuts by the carriers.
Virgin on Friday grounded all domestic flying except for a single Sydney to Melbourne return service operating six days a week. Qantas and its budget offshoot Jetstar continue to fly to each capital city but at a significantly reduced frequency due to travel restrictions put in place to slow the spread of coronavirus.
Federal transport minister and deputy prime minister Michael McCormack said he was talking to both airlines about funding domestic flights to ensure routes between capital cities could remain open.
"We... need of course to transfer people around from capital city to capital city," Mr McCormack said in an interview with ABC television on Monday morning.
State government is enlisting the help of private pathology labs and general practitioners to further expand Western Australia’s COVID-19 testing regime.
Health Minister Roger Cook on Monday said in coming days an announcement would be made about eight new centres in the metropolitan and Peel regions where people could get tested on referral from their GP.
“In the last couple of weeks we've had extensive discussions with private pathology labs and the GP community to talk about how we can continue to widen the number and the scope of people who test for COVID-19,” he said.
“We will continue to expand the volume of people that we test and continue to make great strides in making sure that we have absolute line of sight of any community based transmission of the disease.”
Western Australia recorded six new cases of COVID-19 overnight, bringing the state’s total to 523.
Two of those are of WA origin while the other four were linked to the Artania cruise ship.
The new cases are aged between 33 years old and 70. The department is still working through contact tracing details.
Of the patients, five are from the metropolitan area and one is from the Wheatbelt.
WA Health Minister Roger Cook said five of the cases related to cruise ships, four from the Artania and one from the Costa Victoria.