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We were warned that more extreme measures to control coronavirus were coming. Now, the Prime Minister has outlined what they will be.
Scott Morrison said the Government would be recommending all non-essential gatherings of more than 500 people should be cancelled, starting Monday.
"What we are announcing today is just another step," he said.
"It is precautionary. It is getting ahead of this to ensure that we can minimise the impact on your health."
What events are being cancelled?
The events the Government is recommending be called off include concerts, festivals, shows and sport. Some sporting events will go ahead, but without spectators.
It's not recommending the closure of schools, universities or childcare centres — yet — and public transport will continue to operate.
"Generally speaking, we're talking about a static gathering where people are together for a period of perhaps up to two hours," Australia's chief medical officer Brendan Murphy said.
"That is generally where you have a high risk of exposure.
"Casual exposure — walking through a train station or an airport — is much, much lower risk, so we're talking about those constant periods of contact."
Why cancel big events?
Professor Murphy said the decision was taken after seeing the numbers of people being diagnosed with coronavirus growing every day in Australia.
"You might only have one or two people at a very large event who might be carrying the virus, and the chance of it being spread at those large events accelerates the rate of progression of this virus," he said.
"So this is a precautionary measure on the basis of the numbers slowly increasing over the course of the last week in Australia."
The Government had been under a lot of pressure from worried doctors, including several state presidents of the Australian Medical Association who were publicly lobbying for an events ban.
Professor Bill Bowtell, from the Kirby Institute for Infection and Immunity, had been savaging the Government on TV and radio on Friday, saying it had "not approached this with the seriousness it deserves".
Why wait until Monday?
Professor Murphy said the Government was aiming to get "ahead of the curve".
"We think that by that time we will start to see, again, a few more cases of community transmission," he said.
"It wouldn't have mattered if they'd made a decision one or two days either side."
But not all experts agree.
"This should not be starting on Monday," Professor Bowtell told ABC Radio Melbourne. "It should be starting now.
"There should be no large gatherings over the coming weekend.
"It is a bad decision for public health to expose 80,000 people in a stadium … and have a little scientific experiment to see the extent of coronavirus in the population."
He called on the Government to release the advice, including scientific modelling, it had based the decision on.
I'm young and fit. Why should I stop going out and having fun?
"Young people don't seem to be getting the infection very severely, which is great," University of Queensland infectious disease expert Linda Selvey said.
"But they are still capable of transmitting the infection to others.
"They could then pass it on to people who may not be young and fit, who might suffer severe consequences of the infection.
"We're all in this together. Young people need to avoid the risk of spreading the infection further in the community more rapidly and therefore placing older people at risk."
Professor Selvey said many people could catch — and spread — coronavirus without even knowing it, because of its relatively long incubation period.
"It could be a week to 10 days, sometimes even longer, so people could be carrying infection and have no idea," she said.
"With this particular virus, it is capable of being transmitted from people who are not particularly sick and may have very few symptoms."
How much difference will it make?
A ban on mass gatherings is designed to do what disease experts refer to as "flattening the curve" — slowing the spread of the virus so the number of cases remains at a level the health system can cope with.
If the disease spreads more slowly, fewer people are infected at the same time. That means hospitals and doctors have more chance of coping with those severe cases that require medical attention.
The experience of other countries shows that bans on mass gatherings can have a significant effect on the spread of the virus.
Places that quickly introduced such bans and other "social distancing" measures, such as China's Hubei province where the virus first broke out, had a far slower rate of infection than places that didn't, such as Iran and Italy.
Professor Selvey says she believes the Government has made the right decision at the right time.
"There is now risk of transmission of COVID-19 in the community that can't be tracked," she said.
"Therefore we need to try to limit the spread within the community as much as possible, to slow down the spread of the virus so that we don't get large numbers of people infected at one particular time.
"We know that apart from contact with surfaces that other people have contact with, the biggest risk is when you have fairly close face-to-face contact, sharing a small area with people for significant time."
Should I work from home and stop sending my kids to school?
Professer Selvey says she doesn't think we've reached a point where schools and offices need closing — but that may change if the situation worsens.
"When you're working from home, what you're doing is limiting the number of contacts you're having with other people," she said.
"It means that if you or one of those other people in your workplace are infectious and not aware of it, you're limiting the opportunity for you to pass on that infection or for them to pass on that infection to you.
"Also, when you're working from home, you don't rely on [public] transport to get there."
"But the downside is that, for a start, some work needs that face-to-face contact with people, and also there are social downsides as well."
"The thing about schools is that young people tend to have a lot more contact with each other.
"They tend to be very effective at spreading viruses amongst themselves and then bringing it home to their parents and the wider community."
Monash University Professor of Medicine Paul Komesaroff, who directs the Centre for Ethics in Medicine and Society, said the benefits of closing schools had to be weighed up against the social impacts.
"That will not just cause anxiety, but it will cause further dislocation in the workforce because someone has to look after those children," he said.
"It's usually their parents who will therefore have to stay home."
What other social effects will this have?
Professor Komesaroff said cancelling mass gatherings would have a major impact on many Australians.
"We just don't know how long the crisis is going to last — the loss of cultural activity will affect people like performers, those in the arts industry, the sports industry and so on, and it will also affect the people who are the audiences and participants in those events," he said.
"So it will perhaps erode or undermine the cultural activity and the cultural content of the society as a whole."
He said the pandemic was already infiltrating people's personal experiences.
"Clearly the fact that we can't shake hands with people or hug or kiss them in everyday greetings, that will have an effect," he said.
"I think there could be a really profound transformation in the ways we relate to each other and we relate to the world."
What about the PM's plans to go to the footy?
Mr Morrison raised some eyebrows during the announcement when he reiterated he would be attending an NRL match on the weekend.
The Prime Minister said he suspected he would be watching future games on television, but for now he was comfortable with the threat.
"The fact that I would still be going on Saturday speaks not just to my passion for my beloved Sharks, it might be the last game I get to go to for a long time," he said.
"My point is that there is absolute reason for calm and proportionately responding to the challenges that we have here.
"These are things that will be scaled up in the weeks ahead."
Later, though, after Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was diagnosed with coronavirus, a spokesman for the Prime Minister said he would no longer be attending the game.
Topics: health, diseases-and-disorders, infectious-diseases-other, respiratory-diseases, epidemics-and-pandemics, events, arts-and-entertainment, sport, australia
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