Weekly COVID news at a glance

1 Anti-lockdown protests

Hundreds of protesters have been arrested and many more fined after thousands of people flouted health orders to gather at anti-lockdown rallies across the country.

Melbourne

Victoria’s police commissioner has called the anti-lockdown protest in Melbourne over the weekend the most violent protest seen in 20 years. The crowd of four-thousand protesters were largely unmasked and set off flares, as they moved through the CBD on Saturday.

More than two hundred people were arrested and at least nineteen will be taken to court rather than issued with fines. Nine police officers ended up hospitalised for injuries, however eight of them have since left hospital. Chief Commissioner Shane Patton said the crowd came with the intention of violence and condemned the protesters’ actions. 

Sydney 

In Sydney, the presence of at least 1,500 police officers prevented large numbers from attending a demonstration in the city. In a statement on Saturday afternoon, NSW Police Force said it arrested 47 people and issued 261 penalty infringement notices across the Sydney CBD and regional NSW.

NSW Police Minister David Elliott said he was disappointed some people ignored warnings to stay at home. This time around, several hundred people still attended but efforts to curb attendance were largely successful.

Brisbane

In Brisbane, there was a large presence of police but no arrests were made. Very few protesters wore masks, despite this requirement.

Queensland recorded no cases of community transmission on Saturday. Many people complain the lockdown was impacting their quality of life, despite three people dying from COVID-19 in New South Wales on Friday and 860 cases and three more deaths reported on Saturday.

2 AstraZeneca stockpile grows to millions

Australia has a stockpile of more than 6 million unused AstraZeneca vaccine doses, and doctors and state leaders fear many will go to waste as people increasingly turn to the new supply of Pfizer jabs promised by the federal government.

A further 1.6 million doses have been sent offshore to help regional neighbours such as Papua New Guinea, Fiji and East Timor tackle COVID-19. But about 6 million doses are yet to be used, even as more than half the nation is in lockdown due to outbreaks of the highly infectious Delta variant.

3 Vaccine certificates can be forged easily

ABC News reported that a software engineer in Sydney, Richard Nelson, has found an “obvious” security flaw in the Express Plus Medicare app allowing him to make vaccine certificates with any name and date of birth and featuring the background animations meant to prevent forgery.

The Prime Minister has previously said the certificates are a “credible and effective” way for states to administer exemptions from aspects of lockdowns. To demonstrate how easy it is to forge certificates, Mr Nelson took 10 minutes to make a counterfeit certificate with the name of the ABC News reporter who hasn’t yet had all their shots.

4 Sydney churchgoers fined $30,000

People in Sydney’s coronavirus hotspots are now subject to a night-time curfew and everyone in NSW must wear masks outside their homes under tougher lockdown measures. 

Meanwhile, NSW Police have issued thirty-one fines after a crowd attended a church service in the hotspot area of Blacktown in Sydney’s west on Sunday night. 

They found a group of about 60 adults and children inside the Fourth Avenue building, participating in a sermon. Police say there was no QR code at the entrance and some of the congregation came from other COVID-19 hot-spot local government areas, including Canterbury-Bankstown, Fairfield and Liverpool.

5 Daily in-language information

There are now more ways to stay up to date with the latest vital COVID-19 information in languages other than English, with SBS’ introduction of live broadcasts of the New South Wales government daily press conference on television and SBS On Demand.

On Monday, the 11am government COVID-19 update began being broadcast in NSW with real-live interpreting in Arabic on SBS and in Vietnamese on SBS VICELAND. Both services are also available on SBS on Demand.

Assyrian, Cantonese, Khmer and Mandarin translations are also streaming on SBS On Demand. The multilingual broadcasts show the live video stream of the NSW government press conference, provided with in-language interpretation as the primary audio.