Too late for mask mandates as Omicron continues to drive high case numbers

Omicron’s measles-like infectiousness is driving high case numbers, but experts say it is too late for restrictive rules.

The reach of Omicron is clear in the numbers as the nation reached a grim milestone on Sunday, surpassing 10,000 Covid-­related deaths. Picture: Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

Omicron’s measles-like infectiousness, five times higher than any other Covid strain, is driving the continued high number of cases across the nation, but experts say Australia has done relatively well in terms of controlling case numbers.

They also say it is now too late for governments to impose restrictive rules and mask mandates, with the path out of Covid reliant instead on better public health messaging, better vaccines and earlier access to antivirals.

The reach of Omicron is clear in the numbers as the nation reached a grim milestone on Sunday, surpassing 10,000 Covid-­related deaths since the virus landed here in January 2020.

Of those deaths, almost 8000 were in the first half of this year when Omicron has been the dominant strain.

The majority of mortalities occurred in Victoria and NSW, with the states recording 3934 and 3590 deaths, respectively.

The 2022 death toll is nearly four times the previous two years’ mortality rate combined, with 905 reported in 2020 and 1323 in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

While increased movement and relaxed rules following lockdowns caused transmission to increase, Deakin University chair in epidemiology Catherine Bennett blamed the arrival of Omicron and sub variants “first and foremost” for skyrocketing cases.

“It’s the most infectious variant we’ve had. It’s more equivalent to measles than the first strain and more than five times more infectious,” Professor Bennett said.

“It’s because we’ve got these sub variants. Every time the numbers start to drop a little bit, the next sub variant comes along with not even a brief respite between.”

Ms Bennett said while masks had been proven to reduce transmission, the debate over reintroducing mandates was too late.

“This is the long haul now. You have to move from rules to something else and that something else is really good public health communication and really good education … what I think we have missed is converting to a new way of managing this disease.”

Griffith University Infectious Diseases and Immunology director Nigel McMillan said targeted vaccines were the clear next step in combating the Omicron strain.

“What we’re really holding out for, of course, is that the next vaccine to come on to the market will be a multicomponent vaccine,” he said.

“It’ll have the ancestral strain, plus Omicron, and that vaccine will be much, much better in terms of preventing infection, and even much, much better at preventing hospitalisation and serious illness.”

Dr Makutiro Masavuli, The Hospital Research Foundation Group Early Career Fellow, with the Viral Immunology Group at the Basil Hetzel Institute, performs experiments on the Omicron booster vaccine. Credit: University of Adelaide

Professor McMillan said we should be making antivirals more accessible during earlier stages of infection. “Antivirals reduce the ability of the virus to grow inside you and therefore give your body a chance to recover better to limit the infection and for your immune system to kick in and really give you full recovery.

“However, they have to be used early on in infection.”

Currently, antiviral drugs are limited to people who are moderately to severely immunocompromised or those aged over 65 with some sort of comorbidity, such as diabetes.

Professor McMillan has called on them to be made more widely available if supply allows.

Professor Bennett said while the growing winter death toll was “shocking”, Australia had still done a better job of controlling the virus than the northern hemisphere during their colder months. “In January, places like France had a death rate of four people per million and the US had seven per million. Australia is sitting on under two people per million and that’s in the middle of our winter, our Omicron winter. So actually we’re still controlling it reasonably well,” she said.

“The death rate per infection has gone so far down. You just can’t compare it to what we would have experienced if we’d gone through community transmission back in 2020. We had a taste of it in Victoria, but nothing to compare us to the kinds of infection rates we have with Omicron.”

Of the 28,408 infections recorded in 2020, 3.1 per cent of all cases resulted in death. More than 7.8 million people have been infected with the virus this year, with 7786 people – or 0.10 per cent of cases – dying with Covid.