Less than six months after WA's workplace vaccine mandates started applying to her business, Loren McMath is in two minds over their removal today.
Since shortly after the mandates were announced, she has been working to turn her organic store from a standard retail store into a purely online affair.
She said it had meant going into debt, losing customers and working almost every day for months.
"We didn't have a choice, we couldn't have survived six months of not trading," she said.
"But to go through all of that for only six months of mandates, it's a bit hard to swallow."
Staff 'should have the right to choose'
Ms McMath said a major reason for pivoting her business was to avoid pressuring staff to get vaccinated to keep their jobs.
"We decided as a business that we weren't comfortable making that decision on behalf of our staff and they should have a right to choose for themselves," she said.
"People's medical information is their personal information, and I did not even want to have to have that conversation with them about it."
Everything she has been through to turn her business around means even though mandates no longer apply to retail businesses from today, little is likely to change.
"For us, this is what we are now," she said.
"Hopefully it gives us some more flexibility for what we can do going forward, but all of that is a lot of hard work and a lot of time and money which we don't have."
Premier Mark McGowan has rarely hidden his pride at WA's world-leading vaccination rates, which he credits in large part to wide-ranging mandates.
Since December 31, the mandates have applied to about 60 per cent of WA's workforce, ranging from many supermarket staff to builders, and from bus drivers to funeral directors.
It left those on the fence about vaccination with a decision — find another job or get the jab.
WA had the lowest second-dose rate in the country when the mandates were announced and this was a key motivation for the measure.
Last week marked the final deadline of those mandates when workers had to have received their booster.
And at last count, WA had the highest third-dose rate in the country.
According to WA's Chief Health Officer Andy Robertson, that meant there was "little additional benefit to continuing to apply a vaccination mandate beyond a few workforces".
"The workforce vaccination mandates have undoubtedly made a significant contribution to increasing the vaccination coverage rates, which are now some of the highest in Australia," he said in his latest advice to the Premier.
"With the transition to focusing our COVID mitigation efforts on the most vulnerable members of our community, the only vaccination mandates for workers that should be retained are for those workers who are in close contact with the most vulnerable groups."
It means from today, only those working in primary healthcare, and residential aged or disability care, are still subject to government-imposed vaccination requirements.
Mandates eased, but waters remain muddy
While on paper today is when many unvaccinated staff can return to the workforce, not everyone will be straight back to work.
That includes public school teachers, whose return will be assessed on a "case-by-case basis".
Police officers and employees are facing a similar situation, with the central issue being that when they refused to be vaccinated, they were disobeying an order.
"In the middle of a state of emergency, I expect any police officer and anyone employed in the police to turn up to work and obey the directions," Police Commissioner Chris Dawson told ABC Radio Perth earlier this week.
Employers left with difficult choice
In other workplaces, employers are having to make difficult decisions about whether or not they can put their own vaccination requirements in place.
Rather than taking legal effect from government directions, those policies would instead have to be grounded in workplace health and safety law.
"Employers now have no option but to consider quite carefully the circumstances of their industry, their workplace, the circumstances of the business itself, the particular circumstances of the employees concerned," University of WA employment law professor Bill Ford said.
It means businesses will now have to weigh the risks of staff being unvaccinated against the reasonableness of requiring they be vaccinated, all under the provisions of workplace health and safety laws.
Professor Ford said part of that equation may also turn on the circumstances of individual staff – for example, if some were immunocompromised.
"Obligations of care are owed to individual employees, not to the workforce as a whole," he said.
"So they're going to have to explore alternatives to high-risk exposure, for example, so that's a case where the employer might well develop a [vaccination] policy."
'Infection' not 'vaccination' key issue now
Regardless of how many people return to work, UWA public health lecturer Barbara Nattabi said there was little reason for people to be apprehensive about an unvaccinated colleague returning to the office.
"We should be worried about whether or not someone has the infection, not so much whether or not they've been vaccinated," she said.
Part of the reason for that is that while COVID vaccines do reduce transmission of the virus, their primary aim is to stop people from becoming seriously unwell.
And with COVID-19 continuing to spread through the community, Dr Nattabi encouraged people to continue wearing masks and social distancing where they can.
Fremantle councillor Marija Vujcic was one of many local councillors who tried to get local governments to lobby the state government over the mandates over the last few months.
In April, the Town of Port Hedland voted to take the government to court over the mandates, but is now considering whether to back down.
Layer of trust 'has been broken'
Ms Vujcic said it was very good news that the mandates would be ending, describing it as a decision that had "polarised the community".
She said the government had used "coercion" and "fear" to achieve high vaccination rates and questioned the longer-term effects of that.
"I think we will lose a layer of very talented people," she said.
"Where they will go, I don't know, but there's a layer of trust that has now been broken and I think that can't be good for our community."
Ms Vujcic also questioned why WA had not looked to places like Finland and Sweden which "chose [a] different path" that relied less on mandates and strict rules, and suggested there was no evidence vaccination had kept people out of hospital.
According to Our World in Data, a project coordinated by Oxford University, Australia has recorded a total of 345.86 COVID deaths per million people since the start of the pandemic.
That compares to 833.94 in Finland and 1871.43 in Sweden despite Australia having a higher case rate than either country.
The latest data from WA Health shows of those admitted to hospital with COVID-19 in the last two weeks of May, 25 per cent were unvaccinated, despite making up only about 1 per cent of the population.
As Ms McMath pondered the future of her business, she was hopeful the removal of mandates would bring about less division over peoples' vaccination status.
"There are a lot of people who are still pretty upset, there are a lot of people who've suffered a lot worse than what we have," she said.
"I think it will take time to heal that division that's been created in our community.
"If we look for the points that we have in common we can always find something that we can work with to build community, or rebuild community in this place."
