Speaking at a press conference on Monday, Mr Morrison said it would mean close contacts in food production, distribution and processing, as well as emergency services, would be able to go to work if they were asymptomatic and returned a negative rapid antigen test (RAT) result.He said it would not extend to workers who deal with customers face-to-face.“So, those who are driving the truck to deliver the food, those stacking the shelves at night, those in the distribution centres, those who are in the abattoirs, the manufacturing places that are producing food,” he said.“It’s all of those now caught up in those new critical supply chain rules and we are looking to extend those to other sectors.”Mr Morrison said that the change – approved by the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, which is made up of chief health officers and the chief medical officer – had been sent to states and territories to be endorsed on Monday morning because he didn’t want to wait for the scheduled national cabinet meeting on Thursday.Currently supermarkets shelves are empty and there are meat shortages due to major workforce shortages because employees have to isolate due to being a close contact or contracting Covid at both the store and distribution level.“That paper is now before national cabinet for endorsement,” Mr Morrison said.“I was not going to wait until Thursday for that … we agreed it should immediately go to national cabinet for endorsement, I anticipate they will happen over the course of the morning.” NSW and Queensland have already relaxed their close contact rules for food logistics workers to leave quarantine if they test negative and don’t have symptoms. Victoria will announce a change on Monday, Mr Morrison said.Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said they would not be letting infected people to go to work.“We are not asking people that are sick to go to work,” Professor Kelly said.“We are not asking people that have been shown to absolutely have Covid to be in the workplace. “But we are allowing people to come back to be monitored for their symptoms, to be monitored using rapid antigen tests in the workplace so that they can work and keep those supply chains moving.”Mr Morrison also announced that they were moving to scrap employee testing requirements for small-to-medium businesses.“The Attorney-General is leading a process with the states and territories which we anticipate being concluded in time for national cabinet on Thursday,” he said.“It will remove any suggestion of a requirement that small-to-medium sized businesses have to be undertaking testing of their staff.”The Prime Minister said small-to-medium businesses in the critical supply sector would also get support with testing their staff under the relaxed isolation requirements. “Large businesses in critical supply chains like Coles and Woolies and so on have the means to be able to support the arrangements,” he said.“There are small and medium sized businesses in the supply chain in those critical supply chains which won’t have necessarily those resources.”
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