Australia ignores hard won lesson from previous pandemic waves

COVID is again tearing through the country, evading immunity from vaccines and previous infections. Australia is recording close to 50,000 cases a day, with a peak expected around late July to mid-August. Most are the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants.

Governments should have learned many lessons from the past two and a half years. But have they? It seems not.

On Monday the national cabinet will hold a snap meeting to discuss crisis payments that ended on June 30. Premiers and opposition leaders from New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Tasmania and the ACT are calling for the payments to be reinstated, with NSW Liberal Premier Dominic Perrottet saying COVID-19 policies should “never be set and forget”.

Stopping the spread

Victoria’s Health Minister Mary-Anne Thomas has said she disregarded the advice of the state’s chief health officer to mandate masks in retail and early education settings, saying Victorians needed to make their own decisions. Across the country, masks are generally only mandated on public transport and in hospitals or residential aged care, though how compliant the general public is in such cases isn’t clear. 

Transmissibility is a major concern: while vaccines, as predicted, have been incredibly successful at limiting severe disease and death, they don’t stop transmission. Given vaccines decrease symptoms, many who have COVID-19 aren’t aware of it. 

Free RATs for concession card holders are also coming to an end, as the federal government argues the tests — which have dropped from around $24 a test to $8 — are now affordable enough. But RATs are repeatedly turning up negative results due to low virtual loads while PCR tests turn up positive results. 

The timing is questionable: a major issue across the Christmas outbreak was how little data we had on infections as PCR testing sites closed at capacity within minutes of opening, and scarcity of RATs meant no one knew if they were infectious. 

Assisting the sick

Antiviral medication is available to Australians aged over 70 who test positive for COVID-19, while those who are severely immunocompromised or have physical or intellectual disabilities can also request COVID-19 treatments. Many immunocompromised people cannot safely have the COVID-19 vaccine. 

But the antivirals have been hard to come by, with the federal government announcing yesterday a new “winter plan” for how to handle outbreaks in residential aged care facilities. The plan includes better access to antiviral drugs, but with most of Australia’s deaths occurring among the elderly, it’s not clear why this wasn’t introduced sooner. 

Gone too is the protection for casual workers forced to stay home as the virus spreads: the emergency payment ended on July 1, sparking concerns the infectious will continue to work so as to not miss out on a paycheque. 

We can predict this

Australia is in a unique position. Thanks to our island isolation and southern hemispheric position, we’re about six months behind outbreaks in Europe, meaning we can look to them to predict waves. But we never have, and this was a major criticism of the government’s pandemic response last winter. 

Modelling by Monash University adjunct professor Michael Georgeff compares Australia’s current outbreak with Portugal’s winter outbreak. The countries are epidemiologically comparable by vaccination, previous infection rates and relative population size. 

If we’re following Portugal’s lead, Australia is likely to hit 70,000 new daily cases by the end of July — and we’re tracking to have slightly higher rates of hospitalisation at 5500.

Georgeff said the data was simple to calculate. Australia should have known this wave was coming. But as Georgoff tells Crikey, it’s not as serious as it sounds.

“It’s surprising to me that we’re seeing such a little spike,” he said. “We’re socialising as normal, and you would normally expect millions of people to get infected. The fact that we’ve had previous infections, the fact that we’re immunised, is obviously suppressing a lot.”