Would the Doherty Institute recommendations on threshold be made public? The answer appears to be No, it would be provided to the Fed Govt and the Treasury would come to the party to possibly negotiate that % down to a more acceptable balanced outcome. An outcome more suited to ensure that opening up is possible before Christmas allowing for even possible hiccups with vaccine deployment and convincing the vaccine hesitants to get jabbed.
You read this report and can now rationalise when politicians say it is health advice that dictates their policy, that it is only half truth. The public deserves to know the independent health advice (including Doherty) and from all the epidemiologists that I have read and heard, they are certainly not aligned with the views of the NSW & Fed Govt.
Why did I feature Qantas this evening and the impact of the lack of resolve of the NSW Govt to throw the kitchen sink at the virus? Because if this NSW lockdown drags on, that % vaccination threshold would be brought down so that re-opening can coincide nearer to the forthcoming election* , and the short term and medium term outcomes would not be good for Qantas and jobs . Qantas will along with many other corporations start shedding staff and cause unemployment to go higher, which forces a thinking to opening sooner than is safe to do so , and if Delta continues to be present in the community would almost certainly exacerbate the chain effect and feedback loop. If Gladys does not bring the virus under control in the next week or two, we could end up with a negotiated outcome where vaccination thresholds are lower than desired before re-opening , even in the wake of the virus being prevalent in the community. That may not turn out to be a good health outcome for 2022 as NSW starts living with the virus with a lower population vaccination rate that deemed safe.
Of course, all personal opinion.
* If NSW lockdown ends soon because the virus is contained and therefore safe to release lockdown, there would be less pressure on the economy and therefore affords more time to wait for vaccination to reach 80% level which could be in March 22 or a little earlier. But if NSW lockdown remains protracted and the virus gets out of control , then the economy would be ravaged in the shorter term over Q4 and there would be less appetite from the Fed Govt to wait out for 80% level vaccination so they would want to bring that figure down to possibly 50-60% so that that threshold can be achieved sooner and in time before elections (that can be delayed till Feb-May 22).
