Federal government backs NSW in war of words over lockdown targets

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has reassured NSW the state can reopen based on current vaccination targets regardless of its daily COVID-19 case numbers, despite a pushback from other states about living with the virus.

Federal government sources have also told The Sun-Herald the Doherty Institute has provided the government with further advice â€" which will be presented to national cabinet this week â€" that says reopening with hundreds of daily cases at 70 per cent vaccination would not dramatically change its epidemiological modelling.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has backed NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s plan to open up at 70 per cent vaccination. Credit:James Brickwood

As NSW reported a record 825 new cases on Saturday and near-record 127,000 vaccinations, Premier Gladys Berejiklian insisted all states will have to live with the virus. She said she had detected a “seismic shift” among her counterparts in recent days about living with the reality of the Delta strain.

Other premiers immediately rejected that characterisation and insisted the national plan required significant suppression of the virus before reopening.

“If you don’t actively suppress this virus then, when you do open up, we will have scenes the likes of which none of us have ever experienced in our hospitals,” Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said.

A spokesman for Mr Morrison said national cabinet had asked the Doherty Institute to continue its work to model various reopening scenarios.

“However, when we reach the 70 per cent and 80 per cent thresholds the findings are clear that we can move forward with our reopening plan regardless of case numbers because there will be far less serious illness for our health system to manage,” the spokesman said.

Ms Berejiklian said the national plan to start reopening at 70 per cent and then 80 per cent double-dose vaccination coverage remained the target, and expressed optimism NSW could reach those goals faster than currently anticipated if the vaccine rollout keeps gathering pace. But she also noted “the lower the case numbers are, the more freely we can live”.

Ms Berejiklian said she was heartened by what she described as a “seismic shift” in her counterparts’ approach to living with COVID in the past couple of days. “There is definitely a change in attitude,” Ms Berejiklian said.

“We accept the Delta is here, we accept getting to zero across the nation, especially once you open up and live freely, will be an impossible task - no other place on the planet has done it.”

But the national agreement over how to open up the country is fraying badly. Mr Andrews insisted yesterday that suppression of the virus was necessary before reopening.

“That is why [on Friday at national cabinet], far from a sense of easing or a sense of moving away from the plan, there was an agreement, and quite some discussion about the need to update the Doherty modelling because the Doherty modelling is not predicated on 10, 12, 15, 20,000 active cases in any state or across our nation. It is in fact predicated on very small numbers of cases.”

A spokesman for Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said the reopening plan was based on less community transmission than NSW has at present.

“There is a huge outbreak in NSW and you can’t just say when we get to 70 or 80 per cent the number of cases doesn’t matter. It does. The comments of the NSW Premier and PM are not reflected in Doherty,” the spokesman said.

West Australian Premier Mark McGowan said after national cabinet on Friday that “I’d prefer Western Australia not to have COVID, and anyone who wants to argue that we should have COVID, I think they’ve got rocks in their head”.

Mr McGowan pointed to an assumption in the Doherty Institute’s modelling that opening up at 70 per cent would begin with about 30 cases in Australia.

However, federal government sources said additional Doherty advice provided on Friday stated that reopening with higher case numbers - in a setting of high vaccination coverage - does not influence the overall conclusions of the model and would only shift the epidemiological curve by a few weeks.

The modelling assumes case numbers will continue to rise and the reproduction rate of the virus will remain above one at 70per cent, but hospitalisations and ICU admissions will fall as happens with influenza.

The Doherty Institute’s director of epidemiology Jodie McVernon was not available for comment last night and a spokeswoman for the Institute could not be reached before deadline.

Professor James McCaw, a leading epidemiologist who advises the federal government, said it was now also unlikely that Victoria would be able to eliminate the virus after the state reported another 61 new cases on Saturday.

He said the situation was so “fundamentally different” with the Delta strain circulating that not only were continued lockdowns required in Victoria and NSW, these restrictions must also be bolstered with extra measures such as quarantine, contact tracing and vaccinations to reach the point where cases stopped increasing and the curve flattened.

“At the moment, we are almost there â€" but we’re not quite â€" in both in NSW and Victoria,” he said.

with Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Annika Smethurst

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James Massola is political correspondent for the Sun-Herald & Sunday Age. He won the Kennedy award for Outstanding Foreign Correspondent while posted in Jakarta and wrote The Great Cave Rescue. He was previously chief political correspondent.

Aisha Dow is health editor with The Age and a former city reporter.

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