The risk of a disastrous coronavirus outbreak in Australia is now at its highest level since the pandemic began and continued escapes from quarantine can be expected at least every month.
James McCaw, an epidemiologist and mathematical biologist with the University of Melbourne who is leading a research team providing modelling on the pandemic to the federal government, said it was “absolutely inevitable” that the virus would spread within Australia.
Vaccination remains the best solution.Credit:Getty
Professor McCaw said while a spate of outbreaks from the hotel quarantine system over the past six months had been managed incredibly well, the nation had also been lucky.
It is, he said, just a matter of time before one of the outbreaks would avoid the best efforts of contact tracers and widespread vaccination of the young and old remains the only way to prevent hospitals being overwhelmed.
Hundreds of people died in Victoria’s second wave last year when the virus broke out of quarantine hotels.
“We will expect incursions at least once a month and more often. And while we mix more socially, the chance of one of those taking hold goes up very quickly,” said Professor McCaw, whose team has provided advice to government and briefings given to national cabinet since the start of the pandemic.
Melbourne University epidemiologist Professor James McCaw. Credit:
“The virus will win. But it won’t have a devastating impact if we are vaccinated.”
Professor McCaw said the risk of a major outbreak was now at the highest level since the pandemic began, about equal to the risk posed around February last year. He said that was partly due to the British B117 strain.
“The strain is more transmissible and it is more severe, and the severity comes to lower age groups,” Professor McCaw said.
His advice echoes that of leading government officials and advisers, who have been frank in conceding they can provide no guarantee if the months Australia has enjoyed without any major coronavirus outbreaks will last or for how long.
Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton this week tweeted that while Australia had the great fortune of being effectively free of COVID-19, the pandemic rages on globally.
“This presents a serious and ongoing risk to Australia and vaccination is our best protection against it,” Professor Sutton wrote.
The federal government’s advisory group on vaccines has also recently said that the “risk of serious disease and death in Australia remains” and cautioned that delays to vaccine uptake increase the vulnerability of the population.
Just over 2.5 million doses of coronavirus vaccine have been given in Australia to date, well short of the 48 million needed to vaccinate everyone aged over 16.
The nation’s rollout have been hit by twin issues of supply shortages, followed by a hit to confidence with news of a rare complication linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine in about 1 in 100,000 instances following the jab (the risk is lower for older people).
The key coronavirus vaccines likely to be used in Australia have been showing impressive results in reducing the number of people falling ill with the disease. In phase 3 trials, mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna registered an efficacy of higher than 90 per cent. AstraZeneca’s efficacy was above 80 per cent, and that’s been backed by emerging real-world data.
Australians aged in their 50s became eligible for a coronavirus vaccine this week, and infectious disease experts are urging people to take up the opportunity to get inoculated, warning that Australia has reached a particularly dangerous time in the global pandemic, which is still thought to be in its infancy, despite having already claimed more than 3.2 million lives.
The number of new cases of coronavirus is at a record high worldwide, with more than 800,000 fresh infections recorded daily, putting ever-growing pressure on the nation’s quarantine arrangements. And more dangerous variants are emerging with the potential to impact younger people, at the same time that social distancing is being relaxed in Australia.
“The biggest issue for Australia is the fact that the pandemic and epidemic is growing. It’s actually worse than ever [and] the virus is very different to the original Wuhan strain,” said Dr Suman Majumdar, infectious diseases physician at the Burnet Institute.
Catherine Bennett, chair of epidemiology at Deakin University said complacency was also an issue. As winter approached, people with symptoms may ignore them, allowing the virus to spread extensively before being detected.
“The way we’re mixing now, across all generations, means that if we don’t have enough people vaccinated, the virus can still move so rapidly, particularly with the new variants,” Professor Bennet said.
“We could even just, with a large cluster, learn the hard way about the importance of the vaccine if we have been too slow in getting enough people covered.”
Professor McCaw said other countries had been using the vaccine to get out of unfolding disasters and turn the tide of thousands of deaths but Australia had a unique opportunity to use it to avoid the consequences of uncontrolled spread.
“These vaccines are game changers,” he said
Improvements to the nation’s hotel quarantine system were important to reduce the risk of outbreaks but was not a long-term solution, Professor McCaw said. There would not be a significant impact on how the virus spread until there was wide take-up of vaccines among all age groups.
“It would be unwise to think that the risk of this virus has gone once we have vaccinated the vulnerable,” he said.
“Especially given that we would expect the B117 variant to come in. We could easily have a situation where our hospital system was overwhelmed with lots and lots of sick young adults.”
University of Queensland virologist Kirsty Short said there was evidence the British variant, otherwise known as B117, was more transmissible and possible more severe, but as it stood, vaccines still worked well against it.
“Then you have other variants, like the South African variant, where there is reduced vaccine efficacy, but there is still pretty good vaccine efficacy,” Dr Short said.
“I think a lot of people in Australia think there’s no need to get vaccinated because we don’t have COVID transmission, but the reality is, at some point, we’re going to open up borders.
“And soon as borders open, you will be exposed to COVID.”
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Aisha Dow is health editor with The Age and a former city reporter.
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