Political support for surveillance of Covid waning in Australia despite ‘waves of mutations’, scientists say

Prof Stuart Turville says the ‘wind is out of the funding sails’ for Covid research despite so much that is still unknown about the disease. Photograph: Joel Carrett/EPA

Political momentum for the monitoring and surveillance of Covid-19 is “fading”, the Australian virologist who developed a world-first method for rapidly isolating and characterising variants said.

Prof Stuart Turville, with the University of New South Wales Kirby Institute, said while the impact of Covid-19 in Australia is waning, the Sars CoV-2 virus that causes disease is constantly changing and “there is still a lot we don’t know”.