NSW premier Dominic Perrottet has said that no additional health mandates will be introduced before Christmas, despite daily cases of community transmission in the state more than quadrupling within five days. On December 19, NSW recorded 2,566 new cases, the highest number ever recorded in a single day anywhere in Australia since the pandemic began. The significant surge in new cases, driven by the newly discovered and highly transmissible Omicron strain and a rise in Delta infections at festive gatherings, has occurred in the same week that NSW lifted almost all health measures, including lifting mask mandates and QR code check-ins on all but a small collection of high-risk indoor settings.
Perrottet said that NSW had always “struck the right balance” when it came to health restrictions, however, the premier also put the onus on the residents of the state to police themselves, saying that “personal responsibility” would need to play a role in protecting the community, adding “the government can’t do everything.”
Rather than mandating safety measures, health minister Brad Hazzard said the government “strongly recommends” that people in NSW continue to observe the health guidelines that were in place prior to being retired on December 15. Hazzard also appealed to the people of NSW to get their booster dose of a vaccine as well as criticising the interval between second and third jabs recommended by ATAGI, which is currently five months. Due to inflated concerns about the AstraZeneca vaccine and the scarcity of the Pfizer vaccine during Australia’s early vaccination rollout, the majority of people in NSW, particularly those aged under 40, are still ineligible for their booster shot due to the lengthy interval between doses currently being recommended.
Health experts and advocates on both state and national levels have called out the NSW government’s response to this new wave of infections saying that not enough is being done to prevent a major crisis in the coming weeks and months. In an interview with the ABC, president of the Australian Medical Association (AMA) Dr Omar Khorshid shared his concern about rocketing case numbers of the extremely transmissible Omicron strain, which has spread to countries all over the world in the two weeks, since its initial designation was made by the WHO. Of the projections recently cited by Brad Hazzard, which suggested there could 25,000 new cases a day in NSW by the end of January, Khorshid said “It’s like to be a very large number and even if the severity is less in Omicron, there’s still the chance of people developing Long Covid [a chronic syndrome of a wide variety of health issues from changes to one's senses of smell and taste to debilitating metabolic and respiratory complaints].
Khorshid also warned that there was “a lot still to learn about Omicron”, adding: “We don’t know what proportion of people who get Omicron are going to end up in hospital. We simply don’t have that information yet.”
Sydney-based immunologist Dr Daniel Suan posted an impassioned video on Facebook on December 18, urging people to take the threat of Omicron seriously. “Sydney is sleepwalking into a catastrophic emergency in January if we don’t do something about it right now.”
Suan is also an immunopathologist, a clinical expert in vaccines and has managed Covid wards in Sydney. He offered a stark warning about why Omicron is such a big concern, including that the mutations in the virus have made it more airborne, meaning if someone is infected in a room of people, “the virus is in the air”. Early data also suggests that two doses of a vaccine do not provide high levels of protection, with efficacy reduced from 90 per cent, in people who have a healthy immune system, to 70 per cent or less. Suan also said that, in regards to the hospitalisation rates, “this is a problem of pure maths,” saying that even if Omicron turns out to be a milder disease than previous variants, the sheer scale of the infection rates would quickly overwhelm hospitals, pointing out that should Hazzard’s prediction of 25,000 cases a day play out, hospital admissions could reach 750 people a day.