Extract from The Guardian
Friday’s national cabinet meeting will discuss rollout of vaccines to children and updated expert modelling.
Last modified on Thu 26 Aug 2021 23.24 AEST
Updated advice from the Doherty Institute, emphasising “caution” in lifting public health restrictions once 70% of the population over the age of 16 is vaccinated, will be presented to national cabinet on Friday.
Guardian Australia understands the update, to be considered by leaders, suggests that coronavirus epidemics will continue to happen locally, and, increasingly, in under-vaccinated pockets of the Australian community, even when national vaccination rates are higher than 70%.
The expert epidemiological modelling underpins a four-phase plan for Australia to reopen once vaccination rates increase. Leaders will meet virtually again on Friday afternoon after a week of robust community debate about the safety of a national reopening plan.
Scott Morrison has spent the parliamentary sitting week attempting to build political momentum for easing restrictions. He’s declared the strategy “the safe plan to ensure that Australia can open up again with confidence”.
But some state and territory leaders have pushed back vigorously against pre-emptive easing given Delta infections continue to rise, particularly among unvaccinated young people. The current national vaccination targets exclude people under the age of 16.
New South Wales on Thursday reported a new daily record of 1,029 coronavirus cases while Victoria reported 80, with half those cases in the community while infectious. The Australian Capital Territory reported 14.
The NSW chief health officer, Dr Kerry Chant, acknowledged infections in Australia’s most populous state “may well go way above a thousand cases”.
Friday’s national cabinet meeting will discuss the looming rollout of vaccines to children and teenagers, consider the updated Doherty advice, and also consider the first cut of work that the governments of Victoria, Tasmania and the Northern Territory have prepared detailing options on how restrictions can be eased for vaccinated Australians once rates hit 70%.
Some states want children under 16 included formally in the vaccination targets in the four-phase reopening plan. But Morrison said on Thursday, given Australia was administering 1.8m doses in a week, the current rollout had the capacity to vaccinate 12 to 15-year-olds “in parallel” with the population aged 16 and over.
While claiming that 12 to 15-year-olds can expect to be vaccinated “in the weeks and months ahead”, Morrison has so far declined to specify a precise timetable for the rollout for teenagers.
On Thursday Labor’s shadow health minister, Mark Butler, said it “doesn’t make sense” that 12 to 15-year-olds were not counted towards targets and said Morrison “at the very least needs to tell parents” what proportion would be vaccinated before restrictions were eased.
The updated Doherty modelling includes refinement of the transmissibility of Covid-19 among children, including in school settings. Morrison on Thursday rejected arguments that the widespread transmission of Delta among children necessitated a revision of the national targets.
The main scenarios modelled in the initial Doherty report estimated how rapidly and how far a single outbreak involving 30 individuals would spread through the Australian population at the time of transition to phase B of the national plan.
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