"Like India": Epidemiologists warn about Delta outbreak
Australian infectious disease experts are warning that the country "could end up with a situation like India" if the Delta variant of COVID-19 is allowed to run throughout the community.
This comes after NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard suggested that the state might never control its current outbreak and will have to live with the virus "for good".
Mr Hazzard said if people don’t do the right thing over the coming days, “then at some point we’re going to move to a stage where we’re going to have to accept that the virus has a life which will continue in the community”.
Raina Macintyre from the Kirby Institute said that letting the virus continue would be "really risky".
“I think for Australia, for NSW, that’s a different proposition to countries that have high vaccination rates and high levels of disease. We’ve got virtually no immunity in the community because very few people have been fully vaccinated, and very few people have been infected,” she said to ABC Breakfast.
“So we are absolutely susceptible. If we let it spread in Sydney, it could impact the whole country and we could end up with a situation like we saw in India in March and April.
“We can’t afford to relax until we’ve got the vaccination rates high.”
Ms Macintyre said there would be at least a three-month wait until vaccine supplies in Australia became “adequate”.
“It would be really risky to throw it all away without waiting that three months and doing everything that we can to crush this outbreak and to prevent further leaks from hotel quarantine and the international borders by mitigating airborne transmission more comprehensively than we have done,” she said.