Australia is ill-equipped to detect serious new variants of COVID-19 because it has dismantled its testing infrastructure for the virus, a leading epidemiologist has said.
Professor Raina MacIntyre, a professor of global biosecurity at the University of New South Wales, writes in a new book the country is now poorly placed to get advanced warning of a surge of COVID-19 infections that may stress the hospital.
"In a situation with poor case surveillance, only the hospitalisation data are informative of whether the epidemic is growing or falling," Professor MacIntyre writes in Dark Winter, published earlier this month.
The ACT government shut its last drive-through COVID-19 testing site in late October, which Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said was the result of falling demand for tests.
"There has been a significant decline in the demand for PCR testing over the past month with numbers falling to an average of around 400 tests per day across the ACT," Ms Stephen-Smith said at the time.
"This is about 2000 fewer tests per day compared with our peak in winter."
ACT Chief Health Officer Dr Kerryn Coleman on Thursday used a recorded message posted to social media to say the territory was likely entering a new COVID-19 wave and health authorities would consider whether adjustments to public health restrictions were required.
"We are in a very different situation to previous waves, with good levels of immunity and treatment availability, and we will continue to work hard to ensure our response remains proportionate to the risk we are managing," Dr Coleman said.
COVID case numbers increased by 30 per cent this week and authorities are now urging Canberrans to exercise extra precautions. A woman in her 80s died with the virus during the latest reported period.
People who test positive to COVID-19 on rapid antigen tests in the ACT are still required to report their result to health authorities, unlike in NSW.
Professor MacIntyre told The Canberra Times in an interview the attitude that the COVID-19 pandemic was over was counterproductive.
"I think in Australia one thing we do have on our side, is we've got a culture that's quite civic minded and leaning more towards public good than individualism. We've got quite a unique culture. It's different from the UK, which is much less trusting of government, and very different from the US, which is highly individualistic and quite anti public good measures as a culture," Professor MacIntyre said.
Professor MacIntyre's book also argues more attention needs to be paid to the origins of COVID-19 and warns science alone will not be able to determine its true source.
"All science has uncertainty in it and the questions of the origins of SARS-CoV-2 is uncertain. And anybody who presents themselves with certainty and says, 'It is this' or 'It is this, definitely, and no one should be saying anything else and no one should be asking questions', you've got to really question their credibility," she said.
" Anyone who is a halfway honest and decent scientist will say, 'There's uncertainty; we can explore all options through these methods and look at what evidence there is for different scenarios.'"
