Read the transcript of Chief Medical Officer, Professor Brendan Murphy's, press conference about COVID-19. BRENDAN MURPHY: I'm just going to give a daily update and provide some more information about the decisions made yesterday, and other things that might be of interest.
So as you know, the continued growth in cases of coronavirus around the world, there is 140,000 or so cases in the world. And in Australia we do have further growth, 197 cases as of 6:30 this morning, but we expect to find more cases during the course of each day.
I want to explain why we moved to institute social distancing measures, the most important of which is the recommendation that non-essential organised gatherings of greater than 500 do not proceed.