Extended lockdown in WA unavoidable even with 90 per cent vaccinated modelling predicts

An extended lockdown in Western Australia will be unavoidable, even if the state reaches 90 per cent vaccination rates while COVID-free.

That is the advice being given to the state government by University of Western Australia professor George Milne, whose modelling for WA’s pathway to living with COVID-19 was presented to WA Health officials a fortnight ago.

A lockdown in Western Australia is ‘inevitable’, even with a 90 per cent vaccination rate, modelling provided to the government predicts.

Professor Milne predicts if 90 per cent of the population aged 12 and above gets vaccinated, lifting the border and letting the virus in without restrictions would lead to an average of 2000 cases a day â€" or, over a five-month period, 300,000 cases, 1750 hospitalisations and 255 deaths.

The figures assume each person infected with the virus would pass it on to six others.

“The holy grail of vaccination is, ‘Can you get up to a threshold that means vaccination alone can contain any future outbreaks?’ well with Delta, our modelling is showing you cannot,” Professor Milne said.

“The simple answer is that we will have to have an early lockdown at 80 or 90 per cent coverage to prevent a burst of cases.

“We’ve done modelling that shows with somewhere around 90 per cent vaccination rates we should be able to get away with a form of Victoria’s stage-three lockdown but with schools open ... that would probably last for about six weeks.”

Victoria’s stage-three lockdown â€" its second-highest tier of restrictions â€" meant people could not leave the house for non-essential activities and were encouraged to work from home if possible.

Restaurants and cafés were takeaway and delivery-only and beauty and personal services, entertainment complexes and gyms closed.

Professor Milne said he didn’t believe a 90 per cent vaccination rate was possible but the higher the vaccine rate achieved, the milder the lockdown would be.

WA Premier Mark McGowan has previously said the state’s border would likely remain closed to COVID-infected states until vaccination rates exceeded 80 per cent, at which point he would set a date six to eight weeks later for reopening.

The deviation from the National Plan (opening up at 80 per cent vaccination rates) means WA will likely remain shut off from much of the country and the rest of the world until at least February, assuming it can fend off any COVID outbreaks in the interim.

As of Monday, 38.2 per cent of West Australians were fully vaccinated.

Laureate Professor Peter Doherty on Monday said Australia may have to get used to being “two countries” for a while.

“Quite frankly, I don’t see premiers in states that don’t have any virus active opening up just because we reach the magic 80 per cent vaccination level â€" it doesn’t make any sense to me, politically or in any other way,” he told a CEDA event.

UNSW biosecurity research program professor Raina MacIntyre, who also spoke at the Pandemic to Endemic event, said COVID-19 would likely remain an epidemic and require long-term control measures.

Professor MacIntyre predicted a “massive resurgence” of the virus if the country opened up when 80 per cent of the population older than 16 was vaccinated.

“We need other measures, we can’t relax the mask mandates, we need to keep them,” she said.

“We can’t drop our contact tracing. The two most influential things we can do is find every case and isolate them and trace the contacts within 24 hours and quarantine them.

“This is not happening in most cases now in New South Wales because the capacity is just too great.”

The WA Department of Health was contacted for comment.

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