Australia COVID LIVE updates Delta takes its toll on the economy as governments look to future

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Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is holding a press conference at 9am.

You can stream it here:

NSW Health has issued alerts for new venues of concern across 31 mostly regional areas.

Some venues visited by positive cases were service stations in West Ballina and Chinderah in the Northern Rivers. The region is part of the soon-to-be re-established border bubble with Queensland.

The full list of casual contact venues can be found here.

From Monday, any South Australians aged 12 or older will be eligible for Pfizer vaccinations.

South Australia is the first state to make the Pfizer doses so available to everyone and is part of the SA government’s push to increase vaccination rates.

The vaccinations will be available to people over 60, for whom the AstraZeneca was previously the only option.

“They’ll be able to book online from Monday as we add more than 60,000 new appointments,” Premier Stephen Marshall said on Saturday morning.

Health Minister Stephen Wade said: “40% of South Australians are now FULLY vaccinated and we expect that to soar now that supplies are coming through strongly and South Australians are seeing that vaccination is our doorway out of the pandemic.”

Almost 40 per cent of eligible people are fully vaccinated in South Australia, with 58 per cent having received one dose.

Australia’s overall fully vaccinated rate is over 41 per cent, with 66 per cent having one dose.

The scenes were confronting and, for the children involved, no doubt frightening.

As a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men and boys left a Ripponlea synagogue, they were surrounded by journalists, camera crews and police. Jostling broke out. Punches were thrown. A cameraman was later hospitalised with concussion.

Bizarre footage later emerged of Jewish men in traditional dress creeping along nearby rooftops in an apparent attempt to evade detection.

Members of Victoria Police take down the details of people outside the illegal gathering.Credit:Darrian Traynor

This week marked Rosh Hashanah, the two-day holiday celebrating Jewish New Year.

While the overwhelming majority of Melbourne’s Jewish community celebrated at home, breaking bread with their families over Zoom, police surrounded a building on Glen Eira Road after being tipped off that a group of worshippers had gathered inside in contravention of Victoria’s lockdown rules.

It was not the first time. Some ultra-Orthodox Jewish worshippers â€" many from the strictly conservative Satmar sect â€" have been gathering in numbers during lockdowns since March last year, to the frustration of police, Victoria’s Department of Health and the wider Jewish community.

A Health Department spokesperson said the department had made numerous attempts through intermediaries in other orthodox communities to engage with the group concerned.

“Engagement has so far been unsuccessful and [the department] is now looking at other options.”

Read the full story here.

For the past two months Abucakary Kamara has been walking around with a niggling fear in the back of his mind. It intensifies every time his throat tickles, he gets a headache, or his regular COVID-19 test results take a while to come back. “Every time I wake up to go to work, every single time, I think I’ve got COVID. I feel like I have it,” he says.

The 25-year-old from Mount Druitt has good reason: several of his colleagues at the western Sydney recycling factory where he works as an excavator operator have contracted the disease. His company has so frequently lost staff due to COVID-19 or isolation requirements that remaining workers, like Kamara, have been relied upon to fill the gaps without the usual supports.

Abucakary Kamara is a young factory worker in western Sydney. Credit:Janie Barrett

He is working five shifts a week, plus the occasional Saturday and Sunday. They could be overnight, daytime or afternoon stints and sometimes stretch for 12 hours. “The lockdown has been tough, very tough for me the last few months,” he says.

“It’s good to have a team at work, it makes it easier to do the job, you go home happy. But working by yourself for long hours, you come back home, and when I wake up it feels scary. I’m not 100 per cent comfortable to go to work because of this situation. [But] I have to go to work, I have to support myself and family back home.”

Western Sydney’s young workers, like Kamara, have borne the brunt of the pandemic in several ways: the local government areas of concern have some of the largest populations of young people in the state, as well as high numbers of workers in frontline roles and a high proportion of people in the lowest income bracket.

Read the full feature story here.

The head of the team developing the University of Queensland COVID-19 vaccine candidate says the “window has closed” on that vaccine joining the global fight against the pandemic, but confirmed they are working on version 2.0.

Speaking at an online scientific symposium on Friday, UQ Professor Paul Young said they were well down the road to developing a new version of their vaccine candidate, using the same molecular clamp technology.

UQ scientists Professor Paul Young (left) and Professor Trent Munro in December 2020 announcing the vaccine was being halted.Credit:Stuart Layt

Professor Young told the meeting that after the initial version 1.0 vaccine was abandoned in December 2020 because of cross-reactivity issues with HIV screening tests, he fully expected the international funding body that initially backed the research, to request he and his team move on to other projects.

However, in a Zoom call shortly after announcing to the world that they had failed in their initial push for an Australian-developed COVID-19 vaccine, the vaccine’s backers told him to go back and try again.

Read the full news story here.

Kristina Keneally’s colleagues enthusiastically retell the moment they discovered just how politically ruthless she could be. It was in the early hours of May 19, 2019 and the corpse of Bill Shorten’s prime ministerial dream was not yet cold.

Keneally had been all-in with Shorten as captain of the “Bill Bus” during the five-week election campaign, standing alongside the then Labor leader on the hustings around the country, revving up the media pack and acting, when needed, as his political attack dog.

Labor frontbencher Kristina Keneally has nominated to switch to the House of Representatives.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

But when her colleagues awoke the morning after their shock election loss, it spread like wildfire that the former NSW premier and one-time TV host had replaced images of her alongside Shorten on her social media pages with snaps of her and long-time friend Anthony Albanese.

“It was shameless and to be honest a little bit offensive,” one of Keneally’s caucus colleagues recalls. “Bill invested a lot in Kristina’s Canberra ambitions; [election analyst] Antony Green had barely called the result on the ABC and she’s jumped straight in with Albo.”

Keneally on Friday confirmed she would embark on the next stage in her political career at the next election, switching from the Senate to contest Fowler, a safe Labor seat in Sydney’s western suburbs. Victory would give her a place in the House of Representatives, increase her already high profile and likely insert her into the ranks of future leadership hopefuls.

Read the full analysis here.

Good morning and welcome to our national news blog. My name is Fergus Hunter and I’ll be handling the blog through the AM today.

To get started, here’s a rundown of what’s in the headlines this morning:

A dramatic sunrise in Avalon on Sydney’s northern beaches on Friday. Credit:Nick Moir

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