#AceHealthReport – Oct.04: About 1 million Victorians are currently deemed authorised workers: Similar rules apply to authorised workers in local government areas of concern in New South Wales.

#CoronavirusNewsDesk says that The Victorian government on Friday set a two-week deadline for all authorised workers to be vaccinated with at least one dose of a #COVID19 vaccine…..as Treasurer Tim Pallas today said business groups had been “crying out for the state” to make the mandate to protect workers.Victorian workers react to vaccine mandates

A group of about 200 protestors walked from the Royal Botanic Gardens, through Southbank and towards the Shine of Remembrance on Saturday.

Chanting slogans such as “my body, my choice” — a slogan typically associated with the pro-choice abortion movement and now often used by people against mandatory vaccinations — the demonstrators held a banner reading “freedom”.

Victoria Police officers trailled the group as it moved.

A spokesperson later confirmed officers arrested 109 people “for various offences” and issued 108 penalty notices for breaching lockdown orders.

“Victoria Police will continue to have a highly visible presence to maintain public safety, and to ensure any protest activity that breaches the CHO directions does not impact on the broader community’s right to go about their daily lives,” a spokesperson said.

Under Melbourne’s lockdown rules, people are allowed to meet in groups of five fully vaccinated people from two households for recreation, or as two people who are not fully vaccinated.

Exercise and recreation is allowed within 15 kilometres of the home, and masks must be warn outside.

Unlike in late September, where violent scenes erupted at the Shrine of Remembrance, the group was dispersed before it reached the memorial site.Protesters marched across the Royal Botanic Gardens, trailed by groups of police officers.

The largely leaderless protest movement has been linked to far-right groups, with some experts expressing fears that people with legitimate concerns were being infiltrated by agitators.

While the group was largely broken up by the early afternoon, plans aired on encrypted messaging apps to converge on a different location did not eventuate in significant numbers.

He said that, if people were hoping to return to work soon without being vaccinated, history had shown the “insidious virus” did not go away easily.

“The one thing that can undermine our community resolve is people not doing the right thing and getting vaccinated,” he said.

He warned it would not be a “short-term aberration” and authorities needed to engage with people who were concerned about getting vaccinated.

The vaccination mandate has been met with a mixed reaction from industry groups.

Many stakeholder groups fully supported the move, while some wanted more consultation from the government.

The Liberty Victoria advocacy group has said the widespread use of vaccine mandates should be a last resort.

Instead, the group said time-limited incentives such as vaccine passports were preferable.

Victoria is on track to have the vast majority of its adult population vaccinated within coming months, with 81.5 per cent of those aged 16 years and over already receiving at least one dose.

Editor says …Sterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links, and can also be found here on Telegram: https://t.me/acenewsdaily all of our posts fromTwitter can be found here: https://acetwitternews.wordpress.com/ and all wordpress and live posts and links here: https://acenewsroom.wordpress.com/and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and free help and guidance tips on your PC software or need help & guidance from our experts AcePCHelp.WordPress.Com

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#AceHealthReport – Aug.26: We’ve got a huge bit of work to do with ventilation across the board in so many indoor settings,” Professor Sutton said….

#CoronavirusNewsDesk says Australia’s air quality culture criticised as experts point to ventilation as key in #COVID19 fight and an outbreak in S.A. medi-hotels last year was linked to poor ventilation, with SA Chief Public Health Officer Nicole Spurrier blaming the lack of air exchange in hotel corridors.

“The reality is there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of indoor settings that need infrastructural change in order to be well ventilated. That can’t happen overnight.”

It was a statement that rankled Lidia Morawska, Director of the International Laboratory for Air Quality and Health at the Queensland University of Technology.

“Stating that it can’t be done overnight … is like putting your head in the sand,” she said.

Professor Morawska has spent her career researching air quality and pollution around the world, and the COVID-19 pandemic has brought her work to the forefront as the world comes to terms with the airborne nature of the virus.

There was initial reluctance to state outright that COVID was transmissible by air.

“There hasn’t been any confusion between scientists about this,” Professor Morawska said.

“Where the resistance has been is from the public health authorities, including the WHO.”

Professor Morawska is a consultant to the World Health Organisation, who only formally acknowledged aerosol spread the COVID-19 in April of this year, 13 months after it declared a pandemic.

Professor Morawska believes the reluctance to acknowledge airborne transmission may have been political in nature.

“It’s much easier to tell people to wear a mask or stay at a distance from others, because then it puts responsibility onto people,” she said.

“If they admit airborne transmission is significant then building and engineering measures, in particular ventilation, have to be taken onboard. Then the government needs to do something.”

Professor Morawska says she has petitioned both federal and state governments over air quality and ventilation, often without a reply.

“The responses were that basically ‘everything is done properly and it’s fine’,” she said.

But the cost of Australia’s poor air quality may come back to haunt it in other ways.

“The politicians have all the data on how much it costs not to have good air quality,” Professor Morawska said.

“[Politicians know] how much every lockdown now costs. Many of these lockdowns could have been prevented if ventilation was better and if transmission did not occur in unventilated spaces.

“The issue of the cost is that we are paying a much, much bigger cost as a society and a country if we are not doing anything about inadequate air and air pollution.”

In a statement to the ABC, Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services said further guiding principles for ventilation in non-healthcare settings were currently in development.

The department also said assessments of ventilation were routinely undertaken in both exposure sites and locations where people are quarantining to determine how airflow can best be optimised.

But some areas in the community are still presenting a risk in airborne transmission of viruses.

Venues that rely on natural ventilation pose notable health risks when doors and windows are closed to keep out the elements, trapping contaminated air inside.

Locations where people spend longer periods of time have also been flagged as danger spots for airborne transmission.

“Restaurants are a particular problem. Even if masks are mandated in the state, they’re not worn in restaurants,” Professor Morawska said.

“We spend in this unventilated space one hour or two hours, and these restaurants are often full to capacity.”

In cases such as the Ms Frankie cafe outbreak in July and the Smile Buffalo Thai Black Rock outbreak in January, the solution may be specialised air filtration equipment.

Rick Stanley is the owner and engineer at Sanctuary Air, a company in Melbourne’s north specialising in medical grade air filters.

“A proper HEPA [high-efficiency particulate absorbing] filter is perfectly capable of trapping a virus, ” Mr Stanley said.

He asserts that it is possibe to reduce the COVID risk by filtering the aerosol.

He says HEPA filters are capable of eliminating particles that are fractions of a micron in size. For reference, the average human hair is 70 microns wide.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, HEPA filters are “no less than 99.97 per cent efficient at capturing human-generated viral particles” associated with coronavirus.

“The probability of those sub micron particles making it through the filter is almost zero,” Mr Stanley said.

HEPA filters are also able to catch other bacterial pathogens, such as the ones that caused an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease this month in the Cranbourne East area.

“There will be an 80 to 90 per cent reduction in the airborne particles,” Mr Stanley said.

But a mass roll out of HEPA filters faces major limiting factors.

There is a critical supply shortage for components for an air filtration system, with Mr Stanley admitting he’s worried about the long lead time for parts.

Orders for fans and filters placed in January still have not arrived.

Installation is expensive, with the fit-out of a regular Victorian home costing thousands of dollars and taking up to a month.

Mr Stanley admits it could take weeks or even months to fully install an air filtration system in a facility such as CS Square, which developed as a major hotspot in the latest Delta strain outbreak.

The nature of air purification also means more intensive filtration is required if pollutants are continually reintroduced.

“The way a purifier works, it’s a competition between the supply of clean air and the supply of pollutants,” Mr Stanley said.

“Let’s say you have an infected person in a shared office. You can clean up the aerosols, but [the infected person] continues to release the virus.”

It makes areas with high amounts of infected people such as hospitals a major ventilation challenge.

A Victorian Government audit leaked in June found that almost 50 per cent of hospital isolation rooms in the state failed to meet ventilation guidelines.

And 11 per cent of Victorians hospitalised with COVID-19 last yearcaught the virus while already in hospital.

When asked about the issue of ventilation, Health Minister Martin Foley said the Victorian Health building authority had already commenced implementing a substantial range of measures to bring the state’s health facilities up to standard.

However, the Minister acknowledged more work was needed in the space.

“It’s barely scratching the surface of the work that needs to be done nationally,” Mr Foley said.

“Victoria strongly supports the calls for the Commonwealth to take a greater lead in this space, given that the building regulations are a nationally regulated area.”

As far as Professor Morawska is concerned, the clock is ticking on Australia’s air supply.

“Every week of delay in telling Australians that ventilation is important is just exposing Australians to more transmission.”

#AceHealthDesk report ……Published: Aug.26: 2021:

Editor says …Sterling Publishing & Media Service Agency is not responsible for the content of external site or from any reports, posts or links, and can also be found here on Telegram: https://t.me/acenewsdaily all of our posts fromTwitter can be found here: https://acetwitternews.wordpress.com/ and all wordpress and live posts and links here: https://acenewsroom.wordpress.com/and thanks for following as always appreciate every like, reblog or retweet and free help and guidance tips on your PC software or need help & guidance from our experts AcePCHelp.WordPress.Com