Ben Fordham says NSW lockdown ‘can’t go on’

Radio host Ben Fordham has called on NSW to move away from lockdowns as cases continue to balloon in Sydney, saying they “cannot go on”.

As Sydney enters its fourth week of stay-at-home orders and cases continue to rise, 2GB breakfast host Ben Fordham has called on NSW to move away from lockdowns, saying the measures “cannot go on”.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian announced this morning an additional 98 cases of community transmission in her state overnight, with experts casting increased doubt over whether restrictions will let up next Friday, July 30, as intended.

“We have the harshest restrictions of any state since coronavirus arrived. Kids aren’t at school, small businesses are on their knees, if you live in Fairfield, Liverpool or Canterbury, you cannot leave the area for work unless you are an authorised worker,” Fordham said on his show this morning, during a conversation with Healthy Living host Dr Ross Walker.

“And now more than a quarter of a million construction workers and tradies are out of a job. It’s never happened anywhere in Australia. They didn’t even do it in Victoria, during their darkest days … This cannot go on.

“I’m sorry to say, we are seeing very little change in the daily case numbers. They want us to focus on the number of people who are infectious while in the community. OK, well, yesterday was 27, Saturday 29, Friday 29, Thursday 28. So we’re not really making a dent on that number.

“And yet the government reckons that that number needs to be close to zero before we can open up. Come off it. How’re we going to get there?

“And at what point do we start showing some courage? Right now the social and economic consequences of the lockdowns are dwarfing the damage of the virus.”

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2GB breakfast host Ben Fordham. Picture: Gaye Gerard/Daily Telegraph

Fordham cited one of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) leading voices, Dr David Nabarro, who last October admitted that lockdowns should not be used “as the primary means of control of this virus”.

“The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganise, regroup, rebalance your resources – protect your health workers who are exhausted,” Dr Nabarro said during an interview with The Spectator.

“But by and large, we’d rather not do it.”

Now, 18 months into the pandemic, Fordham said, we’re “locked up again, no end in sight”.

“And I’m not for a moment suggesting coronavirus is not serious … but at what point as a society do we accept this is not going away? Can we really stay locked up until it disappears?” he asked.

“The Premier said a few months ago, ‘We need to learn to live with the virus’. But right now we’re destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people as we try to chase a number that we may never, ever reach … Why don’t we get fair dinkum and work towards the Premier’s goal of learning to live with the virus.”

The head of Australia’s top medical body, Dr Omar Khorshid, has warned in recent days Sydney could be facing an “indefinite” lockdown “until everyone is vaccinated”.

“Of course, we don’t have enough vaccines to vaccinate the whole of Sydney communities so the only option is to get on top of this virus right now,” the Australian Medical Association (AMA) president said.

“Vaccines are doing their job, we know they are doing their job and we are seeing a number of young people in hospital in ICU, rather than the huge numbers of older people we saw in Victoria.

“That is a sign that the vaccines are working. Vaccines are our way out of this in the longer term but for right now, for today in Sydney, the only way to stop this virus spreading is to stop people talking to each other, people coming close to each other, people breathing on each other, coughing on each other.

“We know this from the lessons we have learned throughout the lockdown, throughout the pandemic and our only option is to do what needs to be done right now here in Sydney.”

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NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Picture: Bianca De Marchi/NCA NewsWire

UNSW epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

AMA president Dr Omar Khorshid. Picture: Gary Ramage/NCA NewsWire

UNSW epidemiologist Mary-Louise McLaws, an adviser to the WHO Covid-19 response, had a similarly grim warning about the length of Sydney’s lockdown — currently pegged to end next Friday, July 30.

“We still need another three to four weeks because we need to get that proportion [of cases in people who haven’t been in full isolation] to zero,” Professor McLaws told The Project last night.

“Once we’ve got that zero, then we need that to continue for 14 days to ensure we’ve mitigated everything.

“Now, you could lift some small restrictions off, but you wouldn’t be able to lift all of them off until 28 days after that first zero of anybody out in the community that hadn’t been in full lockdown.

“It’s a long duration. Expect another two months before we’ve absolutely eradicated it … but we don’t have to stay in lockdown for that long.”