What's That Rash?

Joe Biden has been sworn into office early this morning and now faces a monstrous battle to get COVID under any semblance of control. Yesterday, according to Johns Hopkins University, the US recorded more than 400,000 coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began. As the weeks pass and the pandemic spreads, more and more people are dying. At the moment, an American is dying of COVID roughly every 38...

An analysis of NSW coronavirus clusters has found the state's COVID-19 outbreak could almost be at an end. The ABC looked at 18 coronavirus outbreaks in NSW since July last year and found that it takes authorities three weeks on average to bring an end to each cluster. That means that the cluster which Berala cluster, which began on New Year's Eve, could be in its last days. But on today's Coronac...

While the deaths of elderly people who had received the Pfizer vaccine in Norway has dominated the headlines, it's worth taking a step back and taking a broader look of the worldwide rollout to date. Millions and millions of doses of the Pfizer vaccine have now been given to people around the world, and scientists have been monitoring to see if any rarer side effects are popping up. That's because...

As vaccines are injected into millions of arms across the world, authorities are watching closely to see if there are any unexpected side effects. And a higher than expected number of deaths in frail and elderly Pfizer vaccine recipients in Norway is drawing scrutiny. The Norwegian Medicines Agency last week reported 13 people had died shortly after getting the Pfizer vaccine shot - all people ove...

Coronavirus vaccines have started rolling out around the world -- so when will we see case numbers start to drop? Preliminary data out of Israel offers some hope, but the death of a Florida physician who had received the Pfizer vaccine has sparked an investigation into its safety. (There have been no similar cases recorded in those who have received the vaccine.) Closer to home, could mining camps...

If all goes well Australians will start receiving coronavirus vaccinations from next month. But the types of vaccines on offer are not created equal. High-risk groups will get a vaccine that’s been shown to have 95 per cent efficacy -- but the vast majority of Australians will get a locally produced shot that studies have so far found to be much less effective. Is jumping in with what we’ve got on...

Pretty much since coronavirus emerged, people have been worried about it mutating, but in the past month or so reports of strains that are particularly contagious have caught the public’s attention and begun to guide public policy. What makes these strains different to earlier mutations? Is the so-called UK strain really 70 per cent more transmissible? What does this mean for vaccines, and why are...

On Friday, Greater Brisbane was plunged into lockdown after a worker at a quarantine hotel tested positive to the so-called UK strain of coronavirus. But no other cases emerged during the three-day lockdown, and the region opened up again last night. So what was the point of this lockdown? Was it an overreaction to a single case? Or, given that we know the virus can take up to 14 days to incubate,...

2020 saw the rise of coronavirus but it's not going away anytime soon. In 2021, cases and deaths will continue to rise around the world and Australia will have to handle more outbreaks. But 2021 will also bring positives. Vaccines will be given to millions of people, and scientists will discover new things about the virus that's changed the world. So on today's Coronacast - the last one of the yea...

If there's one thing we've learnt from coronavirus this year, is that when it appears it happens quickly, by surprise, and is very hard to get back under control. That's why health experts are worried that the gathering of people across several generations in homes across the country give the virus some very fertile infection conditions. The home is one of the riskiest environments, and today's Ch...

The coronavirus stage in Sydney has been set for Christmas. Restrictions have been relaxed a little and health authorities are hoping that case numbers won't balloon after families get together for festive celebrations. It's a massive balancing act allowing people to try and live their life as normally as possible, but also not giving the virus too much of a chance to take off undetected in other...

Yesterday, NSW reported eight new community transmission cases of coronavirus with seven of those cases already linked to the Northern Beaches outbreak. The one remaining case's source is still under investigation, but what's known is that it was a healthcare worker who transported a symptomatic family of three from the airport on 14th of December. It's likely the latest leak from the hotel quaran...

There was slightly better news yesterday on the Northern Beaches outbreak front when the NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced 15 new cases of COVID. The majority were from people who live in the Northern Beaches, with only four cases from outside the main outbreak area. And add a huge number of tests across the state, and you could be forgiven for thinking that it could be looking up. So is NS...

Throughout the pandemic, NSW has mostly managed to keep a lid on outbreaks without imposing hard restrictions like we saw in Victoria and South Australia. While those states went into various stages of hard lockdown, NSW used a fast, efficient contact tracing system to get on top of things before they got too bad. But with the growing outbreak on Sydney's Northern Beaches showing little sign of sl...

A couple of days ago, a COVID-normal Christmas all over Australia was looking pretty sweet, but the rapidly growing cluster in Sydney's Northern Beaches has thrown it into doubt. Yesterday, the cluster grew to 17 people. Aged care homes were locked down, long lines of people queued to get tested and other states considered whether to enforce border restrictions again. So what do we know about the...

Just when you think you've got coronavirus pinned down, it manages to struggle free and throw a few mystery moves in your direction. Late yesterday, NSW Health sent out an alert revealing two people from Sydney's Northern Beaches had tested positive to COVID-19. There are currently no known links, which is a worry as it's been more than a month since authorities have been unable to trace the sourc...

The British Government says it has detected a new strain of coronavirus that is rapidly increasing in prominence in southern England. Viruses can and do change all the time in ways that can both help or hinder the strain depending on what the mutation is. We've heard about new coronavirus variants several times: think back to claims of a new, fast moving, wildly infectious strain in South Australi...

A New Zealand-Australia travel bubble is a step closer after New Zealand's Cabinet agreed in principle to establish a bubble with Australia early next year. Australia already accepts New Zealand travellers without forcing hotel quarantine. And despite hotel quarantine outbreaks in South Australia and NSW, Australia has kept community transmission cases very low. So what could be the hold up in cre...

It was one of the four vaccines that the Australian Government had pinned its hopes on, but on Friday we heard the University of Queensland vaccine had been canned. The vaccine had shown promising results in early trials and was deemed safe, but its downfall was that it caused recipients to have a false positive for HIV. So if the shot was safe and effective, and the HIV link was a false positive,...

It's been a huge week for coronavirus vaccine news: mass vaccination programs have begun in the UK, more scientific data has been published about the Oxford vaccine and it's all looking quite promising. But one worry has popped up in the UK with the Pfizer vaccine - some patients have reported allergic reactions after being vaccinated. The UK regulator has now said that anyone with a history of an...

During Victoria's second wave, thousands and thousands of healthcare workers in Victoria were infected with COVID-19. Aged care workers and nurses were the most likely to get sick and amazingly 70 percent of them caught it while they were at work. So how did so many Victorian healthcare workers get infected? And what can we do to make sure it doesn’t happen again? Featured: Marion Kainer, Head of...

If you knew what you know now about coronavirus, what would you have done differently this year? Since COVID came into our lives, more than 67 million people have had COVID and more than one and a half million people have died from it. On today's Coronacast, it's time to look back and see what we've learned from the global pandemic.

As the world eagerly awaits the rollout of a coronavirus vaccine, it’s worth looking at exactly how it might and might not work. While we know from trials that the vaccines are very good at stopping people from getting sick from COVID, that’s not the same as a vaccine protecting against getting infected in the first place. And what the vaccine actually does matters a lot, because if it’s only stop...

It's been nearly a year since coronavirus burst into the world's consciousness, and finally mass vaccination campaigns have started. Over the weekend, Russia started vaccinating people. The UK will begin in the next few days and the US will hopefully follow later this month. And already, hundreds of thousands of people in China have received vaccinations. But on today's Coronacast, not every vacci...

Just as South Australia seems to be getting on top of its hotel quarantine outbreak, a new one is starting in NSW. Late on Wednesday night, a NSW hotel quarantine worker tested positive for COVID19 - prompting health authorities to put out alerts and start contact tracing. NSW Health is taking the extra step of asking people who travelled on certain trains to not only get tested immediately but al...