Bridget Archer (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health. Will the minister please outline to the House how the Morrison government's approach to meet the health challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic is working to ensure that all Australians can have confidence in our vaccine rollout?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Bass, in particular for her advocacy for the Launceston hospital as well as her support for measures taken to protect Australians during the COVID pandemic. Significantly, today is another day of zero community transmissions nationwide—the seventh of eight days, the 27th of this calendar year so far. At the same time, 10,000 lives were lost worldwide in the last 24 hours due to COVID-19. The comparison between Australia and overseas could not be more stark, more graphic or more painful for all of those with connections to those who are suffering overseas. Our containment approach has been fundamental in this. The border protection; the testing, which has seen over 50,000 tests in the last 24 hours—and I thank all those Australians who've continued to come forward—the contract tracing where required, which has continued to improve across all states and territories; the distancing requirements; and, indeed, the work of Professor Alan Finkel, the former Chief Scientist, in helping to oversee that, have been absolutely critical to progressive, continuous improvement, as has been the support of all the chief health officers across the states.

At the same time, we are focusing, of course, on making sure that our capacity continues to improve. We've seen the arrival in Australia of vaccines and now the rollout. We've outlined the one issue which has appeared so far today, but at the same time we shouldn't lose sight of what's occurring. Monday was the first test day, and we saw approximately 1,600 vaccinations occur. We saw six aged-care facilities, which was in excess of what we were expecting on the test day. Yesterday the numbers more than tripled. We saw that those numbers were above 6,000 across Australia. Today we're expecting another significant increase in terms of the vaccinations that have occurred. The aged-care facilities yesterday were over 20, having come up from six on the first day, and today are expected to be in the order of 30. They will continue to grow.

That's the significant thing: the rollout was intended to start carefully, to continue to grow and to continue to grow, and we're seeing that already this week. There are thousands of Australians who are involved in ensuring that we are seeing our nurses, our doctors, our health workers, our quarantine and border protection workers, our aged-care residents and our aged-care staff being vaccinated. All of these things are occurring, and that's the big story of what's happening in Australia: the confidence, the security, the next step.