Premier Gladys Berejiklian insists we’ll begin to reopen once we hit that magical 70 per cent target – but one expert says that’s not an option.
Lockdown-weary NSW residents have been told for weeks now the embattled state will begin to reopen once the vaccination target of 70 to 80 per cent is met.
That’s been the key message from not only Premier Gladys Berejiklian, but also from the Doherty Insitute, which has produced modelling to back up that goal.
But in a sobering interview on The Project tonight, Professor Nancy Baxter, clinical epidemiologist and head of Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, said it would not be possible while NSW case numbers continue to explode.
“I think the Doherty model gives a pathway that’s quite reasonable if you’re at kind of levels of Covid that, you know, you’re able to do contact tracing,” she said.
“And what we’ve seen is that contact tracing is a lot more challenging with Delta.
“You’ve got to be a lot faster because Delta – you know, people that get infected with Delta, they infect someone and then the other people can pass it on within 24-36 hours, so you just have to be much faster with contact tracing, you have to go after the contacts of the contacts, so it’s much more challenging. So you can’t do that with 200, 300, 400 cases. You need to have a small number of cases to be able to do that.”
Prof Baxter explained that while opening up was reasonable in places with 70 per cent vaccination and low case numbers, NSW did not meet that criteria.
“This isn’t a place where NSW is so they don’t have those options,” she said.
She also revealed that the 70 per cent target did not mean 70 per cent of the population was protected, presumably because the vaccinations are not 100 per cent effective.
And she also had a grim prediction when it came to NSW case numbers in the near future.
“70 per cent is really only 56 per cent of the population. So that’s important to note – you have almost half the people unprotected,” she explained.
“So at 70 per cent, you know, things will be better in terms of managing outbreaks, in terms of being able to reduce transmission, because people will be protected from Covid to some degree, but they’ll really be protected from dying from Covid and getting seriously ill, so the hospital system will be protected.
“So these are all great things but it doesn’t mean that there’s going to be able to be a lot of opening for places like NSW that probably by that point will have maybe up to 2000 or even higher cases.”
And she also had a chilling warning for Victoria, hinting the state could easily follow in NSW’s footsteps.
“That is a possibility for Melbourne. So if you keep things at, say, 40 cases, 50 cases a day, get to 70 per cent (vaccination), then it’s an option to think about opening up a little bit, relaxing things, and seeing what happens knowing that you can kind of go back and get things back under control before you get to 1000 cases,” she said.
“I think it’s important to look back a little bit and think about where NSW was five or six weeks ago. Five or six weeks ago, I have it down here in my notebook, NSW was at 78 cases.
“So it’s hard to think that it has grown that big but right now, what Melbourne needs to do is to stop it from becoming NSW and that is a very real possibility right now in terms of the fact that the outbreak has grown so quickly, and currently there are still so many mystery cases or chains of transmission that we don’t really understand the full pathway of.”
Prof Baxter’s comments come as NSW recorded 1290 new Covid cases today, yet another grim record high.
Meanwhile, last week The Doherty Institute insisted reopening at 70 per cent can still occur, even with hundreds of daily cases.
In a statement, director Sharon Lewin said “opening up at 70 per cent vaccine coverage of the adult population with partial public health measures, we predict 385,983 symptomatic cases and 1457 deaths over six months”.
“With optimal public health measures (and no lockdowns), this can be significantly reduced to 2737 infections and 13 deaths,” she said.
“Zero-Covid is no longer the goal once you have 70 to 80 per cent of people vaccinated. Whether you start at 30 cases or 800 cases you can still open up safely.
“It might seem that these ‘test, trace, isolate and quarantine’ measures aren’t currently working – in New South Wales or Victoria. But they are. They are stopping transmissions and reducing the effective reproduction rate from 5 to closer to 1.3 in New South Wales.”
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