Top doc questions stance on borders

VICTORIA’S chief health officer Brett Sutton says Australia needs to come to terms with “letting COVID run” once vaccinations are available to the whole population, joining a growing chorus questioning Australia’s stance on international border closures.

Professor Sutton in April said Australia needed to accept there would be COVID cases once borders reopened.

“We need to somehow communicate to the public that we’ve gotten to a place of complacency because we’ve driven transmission to zero but we will face newly emerging transmission, and a critical juncture where we need to make a call on letting it run,” he said. “I think that’ll be when we’ve got as high vaccination coverage for the adult population as we can possibly get to, so everyone being offered it, and building that confidence in vaccines as much as we can … then we need to really say: ‘Look, we can’t sit on our hands here.’ ”

Prof Sutton said Australians needed to “step up” and get vaccinated so the country could reopen.

His comments echo those of Australia’s former deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, who said the idea that the country could eradicate COVID-19 indefinitely was a “false idol”.

Dr Coatsworth expanded on his comments on Sunday, saying Australia needed to embrace the reality of virus circulating on home soil.

“I think we’ve been incredibly successful but with that success becomes a risk that we will be aiming for something that’s essentially not achievable,” he told the Today show.

“We’re not going to get to eradication because this virus is going to be circulating in the globe for many years.”

Tuesday’s federal budget suggested international travel would remain low until the middle of next year, before a “gradual recovery”.