THE spread of the Delta variant led to a surge in case numbers and forced NSW into a long lockdown but despite this, a leading epidemiologist has said NSW has been successful in bringing COVID-19 under control.
Deakin University epidemiologist Catherine Bennett has attributed the state’s success to its vaccination rate, which she claimed to be ‘among the highest in the world.’
“I was pleased to see [NSW]… was actually focused on vaccination, not case rates,” she said.
In September, Sax Institute published a paper authored by Professor Bennett where she argued that Australians need to learn to live with COVID-19 as the highly contagious Delta variant has made it impossible to reach a goal of zero COVID-19 cases.
“A strategy of having zero cases Australia wide is no longer an option. We must find a workable, ethical and economically sustainable approach to controlling disease incidence, hospitalisations and deaths,” she wrote.
Professor Bennett said she believed that getting vaccinated was the only way forward and that Australia will hopefully be able to open up to the world once the national vaccination total hits 80 per cent.
“The reality is vaccination puts a wedge between case numbers and serious illness,” she said. “So even if our case numbers were to stay the same, we’d hope to see our hospitalisation rates start to come down.”
However, she worried that a ‘patchy vaccine uptake’ would hinder efforts to control the disease.
“The concern is that we will have patchy uptake across states and across communities, so all this will need to be considered when assessing readiness for adjustment of infection control settings.
“Restrictions of some kind will therefore be required wherever community transmission persists until we break through these targets and discover what it then takes to contain outbreaks, and when we can safely ease back on aggressive suppression,” she wrote.
Professor Bennett has predicted that things will start to look different by the end of this year including the repatriation of stranded Australians overseas and international travel for the fully vaccinated.
Until then, Bennett has urged Australians to continue to implement the standard precautions that help prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“Be conscious when you’re around people. Wear a mask. Don’t go to work if you’ve got symptoms. Get tested if you’ve got symptoms,” she said. “But the most important thing you can do is vaccination.”