Seven-day timetable to consider looser rules

Australia faces a pivotal seven days during which more than 3.5 million people will need to download the coronavirus app to give national cabinet confidence to ease tough restrictions.

Australia faces a pivotal seven days during which more than 3.5 million people will need to download the coronavirus app to give national cabinet confidence to ease tough restrictions and turn the fight to reviving the economy.

Scott Morrison on Friday announced national cabinet would bring forward by a week talks on relaxing restrictions, as active cases of COVID-19 fell to about 1000 and all states reported the incidence of the virus was declining.

The Prime Minister said the fight had to turn to reviving the economy, cutting unemployment, getting businesses open and ­enabling Australians to get back to work with almost one million jobs ­already lost in six weeks.

Success would be measured by repairing the economy together with health outcomes, he said.

“We need to restart our economy, we need to restart our ­society, we can’t keep Australia under the doona, we need to be able to move ahead,’’ he said.

Mr Morrison praised Australians’ efforts in fighting the virus. “Australians have earned an early mark through the work that they have done,’’ he said.

State governments remain cautions about lifting restrictions — particularly Victoria, where Premier Daniel Andrews has resisted returning children to school and insisted on maintaining his May 11 timetable for reviewing restrictions. They fear a renewed outbreak of virus infections.

Other states have cautiously relaxed restrictions, including South Australia where 70 per cent of kids are back at school.

At Adelaide’s Westbourne Park Primary School, principal Jason Munro said he was thrilled by the swift and overwhelming ­return of students.

Teachers of classes 2 and 3 students, Christaina Stevens and Karen Lydeamore at Westbourne Park Primary in a packed classroom of happy to return kids. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt.

Teachers Christina Stevens and Karen Lydeamore laughed at the idea of social distancing in a double classroom of 40-odd children aged under 10 but said the school had taken steps to ensure social distancing among adults, such as asking parents to drop their children at the gate.

“They are very touchy-feely at this age and they get right up close to you when they talk, but it is what it is and we just have to accept the advice that we have been given,” Ms Lydeamore said.

There have been no cases of student-to-student transmission in South Australian schools and just one case of teacher-to-student transmission, with the student making a swift and full recovery.

Senior government sources ­believe the 3.5 million downloads of the ­COVIDSafe app will need to be doubled to give health authorities confidence they will be able to quickly trace those who have had contact with the virus and squash new ­outbreaks.

Take-up of the app will be a key consideration as state and territory leaders weigh easing restrictions next week.

“There needs to be millions more; this is incredibly important,” Mr Morrison said. “It’s done on the basis of encouragement in the ­national public health interest but I’ve got to say in the national economic interest.”

Mr Morrison said a failure to download the app was “like not putting on sunscreen to go out into the blazing sun”.

“We need that tool so we can open up the economy … When we start opening up businesses again, that is going to require those businesses opening the doors, getting people back in, taking risks,” he said.

The economic urgency was underlined by Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy in a stark briefing to state and territory leaders, in which he revealed about 1.5 million Australians were on the JobSeeker payment, with 900,000 claims processed in the past six weeks. Unemployment would rise to 10 per cent “and possibly beyond’’. More than 950,000 Australians had applied for early access to their superannuation, with $7.9bn in claims, and net migration was expected to fall by about a third this year and 85 per cent off its peak the following year.

“Our economic and income support programs have put a floor under our economy in these extreme times,” Mr Morrison said. “These programs have been put in place well before these rather concerning numbers, whether it be on unemployment or business closures.”

Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy said Australia needed to meet 15 conditions set out in a “Pandemic Health Intelligence Plan” before restrictions were relaxed, but said it was already doing “pretty well”. He said the nation had met 11 of these measures, but urgently needed to expand the usage of the COVIDSafe app.

Professor Murphy said higher usage of the COVIDSafe app was the “final piece in the jigsaw puzzle of contact tracing” and provided a reassurance the health system had a strong “surge capacity” in place, including enough ventilators and an ICU expansion capacity.

The national cabinet endorsed a series of principles paving the way for a staged return of professional and community sport and an industry code for the aged-care sector providing guidance on visitation rules. The resumption of sport will be a multi-staged process, with the next step involving outdoor, non-contact sports in groups of 10 or less gradually moving towards the resumption of activities — including full-contact training — and competition in sporting events of more than 10 people.

States and territories will be responsible for phasing in the return of sport while also preserving the health and safety of the community. They will be guided by a new framework developed by the Australian Institute of Sport.

In addition, states and territories need to secure funding towards a national plan for enhanced testing while effective “surveillance” plans to track and identify outbreaks in hotspot zones must also be implemented. Each state and territory will also ensure they have adequate supplies of protective gowns and gloves.

Queensland — which recorded no new cases in the 24 hours to Friday morning — is opening schools only to vulnerable students and the children of essential workers. In a leaked recording of the Premier addressing Labor Party members, Annastacia Palaszczuk said she did not want to be blamed for an outbreak if schools reopened early.

“I’ll tell you one thing, they’re not going to be blaming Scott Morrison, they’ll be blaming the state government,” she said.