The ABS's latest Household Impacts of Covid-19 Survey for the month of October was released earlier today. This issue focused on travel intentions, attitudes towards testing for Covid-19 and personal stressors the pandemic has brought on, with responses taken between October 16-26 from around 1,400 households.
Ahead of the summer months, the survey gauged travel plans of Australian households. Overall, 46% of respondents said they intended to travel for holidays between November 2020 and February 2021. In a world without Covid-19, the survey reports this figure would be at 77%. For respondents that planned on travelling in the months ahead, this was more likely than usual to be either within their own state or to another state. International travel plans remain severely affected by the overseas travel ban.
Source: ABS
Internally within Australia, several states continue to have border restrictions in place and this has been a key plank in the state authorities' containment strategy. Today's survey showed that a significant degree of pent-up demand has accumulated as a result, and many Australians are ready and willing to holiday interstate within 1-6 months of state borders being opened up. There is a strong aversion to overseas travel such that on these findings, it would take up to 12 months after the international borders had been opened before offshore travel intentions would begin to overtake domestic travel options. Meanwhile, around 1 in 4 respondents did not have any intention of traveling overseas; around twice the level of those that did not intend on travelling interstate.
In a clear sign that the message from the public health authorities around the importance of Covid-19 testing has set in, 52.5% of respondents said they would "definitely" obtain a test if they had mild symptoms of respiratory illness, which rises 85.2% in the situation that those symptoms were severe.
Together with a strong attitude towards testing is a culture of ongoing precautionary behaviour. Social distancing is still being adhered to, though not to quite the same extent as earlier in the pandemic.
Victoria is now seeing the benefits of its extended shutdown after a second wave of the virus, with no new cases being recorded over the past couple of weeks or so, even after restrictions have been eased significantly. But, as today's survey showed (see charts, below), the shutdown was a very tough period for Victorians across many aspects of life, though the negative impacts on wellbeing should now be dissipating under eased restrictions.
Based on the survey's findings, the Victorian shutdown appeared to have a more pronounced impact on females than males, particularly in terms of the feeling of loneliness.
This survey for October also provided the latest read on the frequency of household activity. As can be seen below, the activities that saw the largest pick up in the month of October were; patronage at bars and restaurants (+6.3ppts), visits to public parks or recreation areas (+5.2ppts) and going shopping (+4.4ppts), though all still remain comfortably below their pre-pandemic levels. The prevalence of working from home, using public transport and exercising/playing sport was little changed over the month.
Lastly, in terms of financial arrangements, this survey reported that 14% of respondents had either deferred or reduced their mortgage payments due to difficulties that arose in response to the pandemic. A smaller share of respondents (8%) had deferred or reduced rental payments, while only 1 in 20 needed similar assistance to meet a bill or rate payment. According to this survey, 12% of respondents had applied for early access to their superannuation with almost all (97%) of those requests being granted. The most common uses of these funds were reported to be paying household bills and purchasing household supplies.
