McGowan raises fears of future COVID cases and deaths if WA reopens border at 80 per cent vaccination target

More than 4000 West Australians will be hospitalised with COVID-19 and over 700 will die within six months if WA reopens its border to virus-infected States at 80 per cent vaccination, under one scenario presented to National Cabinet. Mark McGowan has also conceded for the first time that even if a high vaccination level was achieved in WA, the State Government would likely need to reintroduce some coronavirus restrictions to manage an outbreak. The Premier previously said he did not want to impose gathering limits — such as capacity caps at hospitality venues — when WA reconnects with States like NSW and Victoria, apart from isolating remote Aboriginal communities. But updated advice from the Doherty Institute warned COVID-19 couldn’t be managed with vaccination alone and a combination of testing, quarantine and social distancing would be required to constrain transmission, “even in highly immunised populations”. “Doherty’s health research and the research institutes all say the same thing: unless we get to extremely high levels of vaccination, we have to put in place all sorts of other measures — social health measures, contact tracing and the like — to try to manage an outbreak,” the Premier told an estimates hearing. “In any event, even if we do have high levels of vaccination, there will be some requirement for measures to be put in place. That is what all the advice says.” The Doherty advice was given to National Cabinet on September 17 and contained updated modelling on scenarios for an outbreak being seeded with hundreds or thousands of infections, as is the case in NSW and Victoria. Mr McGowan wants to set a date for reopening about two months after WA reaches 80 to 90 per cent vaccination, warning that “removing our hard border too early would mean importing the virus, which could see Western Australians die”. One of the Doherty scenarios assumes an outbreak being seeded at 80 per cent vaccination with more than 1000 cases, a partially effective test, trace and quarantine system and only “baseline” restrictions, such as the 2sqm rule, but no interstate borders. As WA accounts for 11 per cent of the national population, on a per capita basis the modelling suggests the State would record 106,000 infections, 4177 hospitalisations, 985 ICU patients and 739 deaths over the first 180 days. Mr McGowan said any death was unacceptable, “let alone the hundreds of deaths that are predicted to occur under the Doherty Modelling presented to National Cabinet”. Earlier this week, Health Minister Roger Cook joined State and Territory ministers in writing to the Federal health minister demanding a funding boost to help manage health and hospital systems during the pandemic. “We are essentially saying that the current agreement is no longer fit for purpose because we are in a COVID-19 world and we are all experiencing crippling growth in terms of hospital demand,” Mr Cook said. “Ultimately, under the current National Reform Agreement, WA and hospitals in other States are simply not getting the resources we need from the Commonwealth to deal with that demand growth.” Mr Cook said “the failure of NDIS”, was also causing issues for the WA health system.