Australia will need to make a call on ‘letting COVID run’: Sutton

Victoria’s chief health officer joins growing chorus suggesting Australians need to shift their attitude to letting Covid spread.

Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton says Australia needs to come to terms with “letting COVID run” once vaccinations are available to the whole population, joining a growing chorus questioning Australia’s hard stance on keeping the international border closed.

In recordings obtained by The Age of an event in April, Professor Sutton said Australia needed to accept the reality there would be cases of COVID-19 once borders reopened.

“We need to somehow communicate to the public that we’ve gotten to a place of complacency because we’ve driven transmission to zero but we will face newly emerging transmission, and a critical juncture where we need to make a call on letting it run,” he said.

Victorian chief health officer Brett Sutton says Australia needs to step up its vaccination efforts. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Luis Enrique Ascui

“I think that’ll be when we’ve got as high vaccination coverage for the adult population as we can possibly get to, so everyone being offered it, and building that confidence in vaccines as much as we can … then we need to really say ‘look, we can’t sit on our hands here’.”

Professor Sutton said Australians needed to “step up” and get vaccinated so the country could reopen to international arrivals to boost the education and tourism industries and allow family reunions.

His comments echo those of Australia’s former deputy chief medical officer, Nick Coatsworth, who said the idea the country could eradicate COVID-19 indefinitely was a “false idol”.

Dr Coatsworth expanded on his comments on Sunday, saying Australia needed to embrace the reality of virus circulating on home soil.

“I think we’ve been incredibly successful but with that success becomes a risk that we will be aiming for something that’s essentially not achievable,” he told the Today show.

Nick Coatsworth says Australia will be unable to eradicate the virus indefinitely. Picture: David Gray/Getty Images

“Elimination is what we’ve effectively got in Australia at the moment with no cases, but if we’re not going to get to eradication because this virus is going to be circulating in the globe for many years if not indefinitely, then at some point we need to consider that that virus will also be within our own borders and my message to the medical profession last Thursday was we need to help the community come to terms with that reality.”

Tuesday’s federal budget suggested international travel would remain low until the middle of next year, before a “gradual recovery”.

The budget also assumes all Australians will have the ability to receive the jab by the end of 2021.