The NSW government’s stick-before-carrot approach to incentivising vaccination with prolonged lockdown measures has proven remarkably successful. For a vaccine rollout that was considered in its infancy to be one of the least effective and slowest in the world, Australia, and in particular NSW, has surged ahead for the vast majority of countries, with at least five LGAs in NSW – Hornsby, Ku-ring-gai, the Hills Shire, Camden and Murray River – now registering a whopping 95 percent of eligible adults over 16 now fully vaccinated. Statewide, 87 per cent of adults are now double jabbed and 93.5 per cent have received at least one dose of a vaccine. 90 per cent of children between the ages of 12-16 have also received their first dose. Booster shots for vulnerable people and those who had a reduced interval between AstraZeneca doses will commence from November 8.
However, despite these impressive results, the state is now considering withholding freedoms for people who have deliberately chosen to avoid vaccination without a medical exemption beyond the original timeline laid out in the phased reopening plans. December 1 is the date that all lockdown restrictions, including those imposed on unvaccinated people, are currently due to lift, but according to reporting in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Perrottet government is now aiming to reach a 95 per cent full vaccination level and are considering keeping restrictions in place until that target has been reached.
This could take considerably longer than previous targets to achieve. First dose vaccination rates have plateaued considerably in the weeks since lockdown restrictions began lifting, from a typical daily rate of in excess of 60,000 in August to an average of just 6,200. Currently, around 520,000 people over the age of 12 in NSW are yet to receive a first dose of a vaccine, meaning another 120,000 people will need to be fully vaccinated before lockdown measures are retired entirely under the proposed amendment to the state's unlocking strategy. Perrottet likened the plan to extend restrictions for unvaccinated people to his decision to suspend statewide travel until November 1, saying it had been an unpopular decision but the right one. Elsewhere around the world, vaccine mandates and lockdowns have been extremely volatile issues, inciting riots, protests and political pandering, but Australia – which has recorded more days in lockdown than any other country on the planet but also one of the lowest death rates – has only been able to reach the level of vaccination protection it has through the use of lockdown measures as an incentivising force.
While there have been custers of cases around certain businesses in Greater Sydney since lockdown eased, the devastating hospital loads that the Doherty modelling had predicted in October have not occurred. The public has largely been compliant with vaccine mandates too, with relatively few instances of significant resistance or opposition to showing immunisation status when checking into a venue. For more than two weeks, daily cases have stabalised and remained between 250-300 new cases a day and at the time of publication of this article, 343 people in NSW were in hospital with Covid-19, with 33 of that number requiring ventilation. Daily deaths have remained in the single digits since October 18.
However, outbreaks have led to venue closures in some parts of NSW, including more than 40 schools, most notably in Albury, where every school in the area has had to turn away students this week. Cases are also on the rise in rural and regional NSW, where vaccination rates are much lower than in state's cities. It’s in these areas that Perrottet hopes to increase vaccination levels by setting a fully-vaxxed target rather than an arbitrary date as the trigger for lifting lockdown restrictions on the unvaccinated.