Australia’s health experts and politicians are worryingly out of sync on how to deal with Omicron - so who’s right?
John Kaldor is Professor of Epidemiology at the Kirby Institute, and one of three leading health experts who have released a joint statement asking Australia’s leaders to reintroduce some Covid restrictions, such as mask-wearing and a limit on indoor gatherings, until more is known about the highly contagious new Omicron variant.
“This is a variant that’s clearly spreading very fast, and there are a number of things we can do to stop that spread that are not major impositions on the community at large. Those things can help us buy time while we figure out what’s going on with this new variant,” said Prof Kaldor.host Hamish Macdonald noted that, throughout the pandemic, Australia’s leaders and health experts have been “pretty much” in sync about the response to Covid – until now.
Prof Kaldor offered that perhaps there was still a lingering sense of optimism from leaders given the high rate of vaccination across the country. “We headed towards Christmas with the notion we’d be back to normal – but as with many things Covid, it changes, and there’s this new version we don’t understand enough about,” he said.“We need to put the brakes on transmission so we can it.
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