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Vax and the City: Every public health official in Australia agrees that mass vaccination is the only way out of this crisis. We at Time Out recommend that you get vaccinated as soon as you can, if that is appropriate for your own health. Please speak to a medical professional about what is right for you. Here's what you need to know about how to get a vaccine right now.
NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian has made her most notable shift away from a suppression strategy, highlighting vaccination rates as the new key metric for judging when lockdown measures in Greater Sydney can finally lift. Previously, Berejiklian has said that the state would need to reach “close to zero” levels of people infectious in the community to ease restrictions. However, at her daily press briefing on Sunday, August 1, she said that getting at least 50 per cent of the state’s adults vaccinated would now be the benchmark for rolling back Greater Sydney’s stay-at-home orders. "It won't give us complete freedom," she said, "but if we increase vaccination rates during August, this gives us many more options for August 28."
Current restrictions are set to be in place until August 28, but with daily case figures continuing to rise and many of those people still infectious in the community, modelling like that at the University of Melbourne show it is unlikely the state will reach the “close to zero” target Berejiklian had previously cited by that date. Greater Sydney's lockdown has already been extended four times since it began on June 26.
A pivot away from a total suppression strategy as vaccination efforts have ramped up elsewhere around the world has become the status quo in many countries. Vaccinated people can still contract the virus, but the likelihood of further transmission, hospitalisation or death is greatly reduced.
Berejiklian is the first state premier in Australia to declare vaccination rates as the frontline objective, repositioning lockdown as a means of slowing rather than stopping the spread of the virus. In several press briefings, the premier has said that without the current lockdown settings in Greater Sydney, the state could have recorded thousands more infections, hospitalisations and deaths than it has.
However, Australia’s vaccine rollout has been mired by delays, supply chain issues, and a messaging crisis that has damaged the reputation of the safe and effective AstraZeneca vaccine. As they have in every press briefing in recent weeks, both NSW health minister Brad Hazzard and Berejiklian appealed to all Sydneysiders over the age of 18 to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the state has in plentiful supply. Currently, vaccination rates in Australia are among some of the lowest in the world – less than 19 per cent of Australian adults have had both doses – although the numbers of people getting the jab in NSW have begun to accelerate since the Greater Sydney lockdown began.