Isolation for household contacts to end

|

NSW and Victoria are poised to scrap the requirement for household contacts of people with COVID-19 to isolate.

Business leaders have been calling for the end to the seven-day isolation rule, saying it will ease staff shortages for businesses trying to recover from the pandemic.

NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, Health Minister Brad Hazzard and Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant will address the media on Wednesday morning after the COVID and Economic Recovery Committee met on Tuesday evening to consider easing the rules.

COVID-19 cases in NSW dropped to 10, 856 on Tuesday but jumped by more than 4000 on Wednesday.

Victoria recorded 8976 cases on Tuesday, as Premier Daniel Andrews said isolation rules and other COVID-19 restrictions could be scrapped after the peak of the Omicron wave.

The state’s case number rose to 10,628 on Wednesday.

A few more days of data was needed to confirm the falling seven-day case trend, Mr Andrews said.

“That gives us options in terms of getting rid of the very few remaining rules that we have, and I think you’ll see some movement there very, very soon,” he told reporters in Wangaratta on Tuesday.

Clinical epidemiologist and head of the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, Nancy Baxter says a quarter-to-half of people who have a household contact with coronavirus, will likely contract the virus.

“We need to protect people from those households contacts if we’re allowing them to leave home without isolation,” she told ABC TV on Wednesday. 

“You’d want them to do RATs, you’d want them in masks and not just in any mask, in a high-quality mask like a P2 or N95,” she said.

Employers should be required to keep those people isolated or physically distanced from other workers “because there’s going to be a high-risk of getting it into the workplace for these people”, she said.

“It is (politically) expedient for all of these things to be relaxed because it signals that COVID is over.

“The problem is COVID hasn’t gotten the memo …. and what we’re seeing in Australia right now is … one of the world’s highest rate of new cases of COVID per day.”

LATEST 24-HOUR COVID-19 DATA FROM ACROSS AUSTRALIA:

NSW: 15,414 cases, 15 deaths, 1639 in hospital, 72 in ICU

Victoria: 10,628 cases, 14 deaths, 437 in hospital, 34 in ICU

Queensland: 8995 cases, six deaths, 594 in hospital, 25 in ICU

AAP