Although talks about how to remove quarantine requirements have begun among Australia’s pandemic leaders, Victoria’s chief health officer Brett Sutton said the situation was still too “uncertain” to predict when they would be scaled back.One of the main fears in dropping mandatory isolation is that once it is abandoned Australian communities would never allow it to be reintroduced regardless of whether the Covid situation again worsened, Prof Sutton said.“It’s hard to wind back – you’d want to do it at a point where you’re confident that you don’t need to reimpose quarantine on people, that whatever an alternative might be is something that is sustainable for the longer term,” Prof Sutton told the Herald Sun. “We can’t continue strict, strict quarantine forever. But the point at which we make those changes is still to be determined.“We’ve had preliminary discussions, but we haven’t gone into fine details yet.“I think we need to think through what the next iteration of quarantine might look like. That needs discussions at AHPPC, we need to look at all of the evidence. “It would be helpful to have as much national consistency on that as possible and then to think about what the appropriate threshold might be.”Scrapping quarantine for all close contacts would likely see a greater reliance on RAT testing and masks, which Prof Sutton believes may be able to cope with the known Covid variants now emerging. However, he warned an immediate move similar to the UK – which abandoned self-isolation rules for even those who are Covid-positive on Thursday – was too dangerous.“I’m concerned by the UK’s move about isolation of cases not being mandated anymore, because there’s no turning back on that,” he said.“If they face another wave and they think they’re going to mandate isolation for people, I can just see people not changing their behaviours because they have put it all behind them.NED-5291-What to do if your rapid antigen test is positive“I think there’ll be additional waves – I think that’s inevitable. “What they look like is the question, and increasing our booster coverage gives greater protections to our health system. “But we’d also want to see how long that third dose protection lasts. I think it’s going to be pretty decent, but it won’t be forever.”Despite his reluctance to leave quarantine behind in the short-term, Prof Sutton said he was optimistic about the pandemic’s trajectory approaching winter, which may allow for greater confidence in replacing quarantine with less invasive measures.“I’m not concerned about (Omicron variant) BA. 2, but there’ll be other variants that will actually get away from us much more substantially and in really big numbers – (but) I suspect without the deaths and without the hospitalisation as we get higher and higher vaccine coverage. “We don’t want to jump into a ‘quarantine is over and RAT testing is a perfect substitute for it’ because there’s never going to be a perfect substitute.“But are there sufficient ones that won’t put us in a bad position in terms of hospital cases again, filling up our ICUs? “I think there are options available to us and it will probably be some combination of mask wearing and RAT testing in lieu of quarantine, but it needs the time and space to consider it in detail.”
Powered by WPeMatico
