Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Chisholm. She has shown great leadership and strength during the course of the coronavirus outbreak. Within her community, and within the Chinese-Australian community right across the country, she's helped with communication, she's helped in providing reassurance and she's been a very important bridge to that community, which has been a task and a responsibility shared by all in this House.

Globally, what we have seen overnight is that numbers have now exceeded 90,000 cases of confirmed coronavirus around the world. We have now seen almost 3,100 lives lost sadly, including the case in Australia of Mr Kwan. As part of that we have now seen, as the Prime Minister said, 75 countries affected, including countries with their first confirmed case such as Indonesia, Portugal and Saudi Arabia. As a consequence of that, we have moved to put in place very strong protections. In particular, in relation to those protections, was the declaration by the Chief Medical Officer on 21 January—well ahead of some of the international organisations—that COVID-19, as it's now known, is a disease of human pandemic potential. In response, that has included some of the strongest border protection measures in the world, declaring on 1 February that—

Mr Husic interjecting—

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