And Casey the numbers have bounced around a bit in the last few days
in Sydney but they haven't been good.
That's right David, we really just can't say at the moment that the curve is bending
we're looking at about cases a day over the last few days
and we're starting to see some indication that the health system is starting to struggle
at least in that non-urgent elective surgeries have now been cancelled across Sydney.
Contact tracers they've fallen behind as well. These are the number of cases that were not isolated
through their full infectious period each day and I've included in that all of the cases
where New South Wales Health didn't know the isolation status as of 11 o'clock in the morning each day
because we have to include those now because it's most of the cases.
120 of yesterday's, we just didn't know whether they were isolated or not.
The rules, they're a bit of a patchwork at the moment across sydney but there's broadly two zones
where most of the cases are occurring and those eight concerning LGAs, the toughest rules,
and what we're seeing there is that the government is stepping up its policing, its enforcement-kind-of-approach in that area
in the hopes that more compliance will push this curve down rather than up.
What we're not seeing at the moment is much in the way of direct targeting of where transmission is occurring,
in some of those essential workplaces. We learned yesterday of a big cluster in the freight industry.
Is there more that could be done there in that industry to ensure people are mixing less?
And in the rest of sydney it's got far fewer cases but it's not as though the curve isn't still growing.
The approach has been when the government sees cases growing in a particular LGA
they pull them out of that and lump them in with the concerning LGAs under the tougher rules
and if that's the practice, if that's what we'll see continued, well this isn't a prediction
but these are the LGAs that could be next. In the past week ending Friday, Bayside had 29 cases,
Strathfield 22, the Inner West and Northern Beaches both had 17 cases.
In fact all of these LGAs have had more cases in the past week than Campbeltown had the previous week when it had nine,
and this week Campbeltown had 62 cases.
David, vaccinations they're the end game here in this pandemic and in the coming weeks and months
they will drive the reproduction number of this virus down
and make outbreaks easier to control but we really do need to see some bending in this curve,
at least a stop to the growth, we risk putting all of our health systems, our contact tracing systems,
under too much strain before we see the benefit of the vaccinations.
Casey the vaccination targets, these thresholds National Cabinet agreed to on Friday, how hard will they be to achieve?
Yeah so the rules as set down on Friday evening by the Prime Minister, we need
to get this 18.8 percent of people both fully protected up to 70 across the country
and of course the pace of that is happening at different speeds across different states.
Let me take you to this one here where if we were to see the current pace of vaccination continue,
this week's pace continue, into the future, well the ACT might get its first dose rate up to 70 by
this month in fact. New South Wales and Tasmania they might get there in September so that's the
first doses. Add on a bit of time to get second doses into arms, realistically you're looking
at about late November for those three states and territories to be 70 fully protected.
Now we're actually expecting the pace to pick up from here so hopefully those are pretty conservative
guesses, but two of the states that might find themselves lagging at least on the current trends
are Queensland and WA because they're actually administering fewer first doses than second doses
at the moment. That could prove to be a throttle on their progress in the coming months. Of course the
other thing is how ambitious is this target kind of on an international scale? Well the 70 percent target
is of people age 16 plus. When you consider it as a population wide target, it's equivalent to about 56 percent
of the Australian population, and there are countries that have, not a lot of countries but not
most countries, that have got to that 56 percent threshold. Some smaller countries like Malta, it is a bit
easier to get full coverage across smaller islands like that, but they've got 86 percent fully protected.
You've got Israel of course. They have been sitting though below the equivalent of about 80 percent
threshold for quite some time, and then some larger countries that are getting to that point now.
We've got the UK, we've got Canada, we've got Spain, we've got Singapore, all sitting about that 56, 55, 57 percent
mark, and the United Kingdom is obviously lifting a lot more restrictions at the
moment than Australia is even contemplating doing under phase B. There is a big difference
there though. There is a lot more people in the United Kingdom with natural immunity
because they've already had COVID-19 and that increases your herd protection. David of course
in Australia we don't have that. Just point one five percent of australians have had SARSCOV2.