From WA Today.
West Australian Premier Mark McGowan has defended his border backflip as necessary to save hundreds of local elderly lives as compared to the eastern states.
But a local infectious disease expert says that’s a fallacy.
More than 22,000 people interstate await G2G approvals to get into WA, with more expected once conditions get expanded after February 5 to include compassionate grounds, families being reunited, and children returning to school.
“We’re just trying to save West Australian lives and stop people losing their parents, in particular older people,” Mr McGowan said on Wednesday.
“They’re dying in large numbers over east and getting very, very ill.
“The death rate is one thing, but the people on ventilators in intensive care in hospitals, unable to breathe: this is a human tragedy.
“And what our measures are designed to do, in light of the Omicron strain, is to reduce the impact to Western Australia while we get that third dose up.”
Hollywood Hospital infectious disease expert Clay Golledge likened WA to a totalitarian state.
“Mark McGowan has had a history of instilling fear into the population,” he said.
“So his modus operandi is to install maximum fear, and then act as the protector because that’s worked very well for him.
“And the majority of Western Australians have got behind him, prepared to support the hard borders because it’s worked.”
Dr Golledge opposed delaying the hard border, saying holding off for people in their 20s or younger would only put the vulnerable more at risk due to waning vaccination protections.
“So the longer we wait to get younger people boosted who don’t need a booster, the worse it’s going to get for the people who do need it,” he said.
Dr Golledge said those ‘tier one’ groups in aged care, frontline healthcare or were immunocompromised had already had their booster and Omicron was not the big killer the Premier was portraying.
He pointed to a recent study out of Switzerland, where Omicron was the predominant strain, that showed the death rate per 100,000 people who were triple-vaccinated was 0.27 per cent.
“So you’ve got about a one in 400,000 chance of dying, and you’ve got about one in 70,000 chance of dying if you’re double-vaccinated,” Dr Golledge said.
He said vaccinating children was mainly to protect adults.
“What we do know is that vaccines aren’t terribly efficient in terms of protecting against disease acquisition and disease transmission. But they are very, very effective against severe disease prevention,” Dr Golledge said.
“Young kids don’t get severe disease, it’s very rare that I see that.”
Globally, the standard of one dose in children was considered adequate to counter severe disease due to COVID-19 because “kids get a really robust initial immune response”, Dr Golledge said.
“So we’ve got it all kind of the wrong way around,” he said.
“And hiding away thinking that we’re going to attain some sort of COVID-zero, or we can escape any large outbreak, it’s just fallacious.”
