Working people might be spending eight hours with someone who is Covid-positive and they are no longer considered a close contact … Those people who have worked next to someone for a really long time and aren’t included in that definition of “close contact†no longer get isolation payments.
So if you run out of sick leave or if you never had any in the first place, it means you are stuck with nothing during that period of time. So this is, I hope, just an oversight, but an oversight the prime minister has made and it has got to be fixed.
We are told to live with the virus, but the idea was not for everyone to get sick at once and this is what has happened unfortunately. Health care workers, whether they be ambos or whether they be in the emergency departments, or in the hospitals are absolutely exhausted, absolutely exhausted. It is mayhem for them and extremely stressful. And it is very, very anxious time for people who are sick.
I’ve never seen so many sick people not knowing whether or not they need to go to hospital or not. We really just need to know that the prime minister actually understand the depth of this crisis and the burden that is being placed on us, on frontline workers, both a financial one for people now losing their jobs
