Don’t drop guard against unpredictable COVID
AMA President warns against complacency in dealing with COVID-19 and casts doubt on claims that it will become ‘just like flu’.
AMA President warns against complacency in dealing with COVID-19 and casts doubt on claims that it will become ‘just like flu’.
AMA President Dr Omar Khorshid warns against dropping our guard against COVID-19, which is proving to be unpredictable.
Dr Khorshid was quoted in the Weekend Australian in a feature article, “The Long Road to COVID Normal”, along with leading scientists, chief medical officers and health experts.
He expressed concern that complacency had crept into national decision-making in 2021, which had been driven by a false sense of security about the accelerated vaccine take-up.
“Governments of all stripes, state and federal assumed the best when they should have prepared for the worst,” Dr Khorshid said.
He said governments had based decisions at the end of last year that were more appropriate for Delta rather than Omicron and had resulted in infection spreading despite high vaccination rates.
Dr Khorshid was skeptical that health authorities could assume that COVID-19 could ever be managed like influenza.
“I think the main problem is that we actually just don’t know. There are plenty of people making predictions…that we will be able to treat this like flu going forward,” he said.
“But it only takes another variant developing out of Omicron that is more severe and evades the vaccine and we are straight back into an emergency.”
Dr Khorshid also appeared on Nine Network’s Today show and warned that more restrictions, such as closing nightclubs and bringing in density limits, may have to be introduced in Western Australia to deal with the latest outbreak of COVID-19.
He said setting a date for reopening the WA border would prompt people to get their booster and “to focus the mind of the health system to get itself ready for the wave that we know is coming”.
