Plea to wear masks, get booster shots as cases skyrocket | lucy_carroll marywardy LucyCormack
Advice from the state’s top doctor is at odds with the government’s decision to ease restrictions on wearing masks, with Kerry Chant urging people to keep wearing them amid warnings NSW could hit 25,000 cases a day by January.
Health authorities said modelling indicated it was plausible daily infections may run into the tens of thousands in the new year and Omicron was expected to become the dominant strain. At the same media briefing, Mr Perrottet announced only household contacts of positive cases would be required to go into isolation, asking people to take personal responsibility for avoiding infection as restrictions lifted before Christmas.
UNSW’s Associate Professor James Wood, whose team ran the new modelling for NSW Health, said the current growth rate could mean more than 10,000 daily cases “sometime in the next few weeks”. “During Delta we maxed out at about 150,000 tests each day. We aren’t sure to what extent our testing capacity will cope as cases rise.”Dr Wood said it would take a few more weeks as data emerges from the UK to understand the clinical severity of the variant, but the risk of hospilisation could be “tenfold lower than during the Delta wave”.
Moving away from placing social contacts in isolation did not lead to a considerable increase in case numbers in Victoria, said Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett.
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