Monkeypox vaccines will arrive in Western Australia within days, after the state recorded its first case of the disease in a traveller returning from overseas.
About 1,300 doses will be made available within the next week, with distribution to be concentrated in priority groups.
"Sexual health clinics are the likely place where that will happen," WA deputy chief health officer Paul Armstrong said.
Mr Armstrong said a vaccination priority list was still being developed, but would likely target people at higher risk of infection and immunocompromised groups.
"It's a vaccine that's in very short supply around the world ... there's only a very small amount so we have to be very judicious in how we prepare the priority list," he said.
The Federal Government announced on Thursday they had secured almost half a million third-generation vaccines for monkeypox.
More portions of those vaccines are set to arrive in WA in September, and next year.
'Low risk' of spreading out of control
Both experts and authorities say it's unlikely for monkeypox to spread out of control in WA due to the low risk of transmission.
"In Western Australia, our health advice is that it's very, very low risk," Premier Mark McGowan said.
Health authorities say WA's single recorded case is currently in isolation, and contact tracing has mostly been completed.
The disease spreads through close physical contact and body fluids, which makes the risk of spread much less than diseases like COVID and the flu, according to infectious diseases expert Dr Paul Griffin.
"We shouldn't be necessarily worried about this … we ask people to isolate, and that's enough to prevent their chances of onward transmission," he told ABC Radio Perth.
"The main thing, again, is just that awareness. We need to have the general public to be aware of the kind of symptoms and the risk factors."
Initial monkeypox symptoms include fever, headache, muscle ache, back ache, swollen lymph nodes, chills and exhaustion, and a rash that can look like pimples or blisters.
About 60 cases have been detected in Australia.
Good news on the COVID front: researchers
As WA prepares to face the prospect of another disease, experts said the state's COVID caseload was likely to continue to ease over the next few weeks.
Researchers from the Telethon Kids Institute generated a simulation tool for mapping COVID outbreaks and said it projected WA's case numbers would continue to fall.
"The daily case numbers here in WA have been coming down steadily over the past fortnight … our model forecasts that that trend will continue through to the end of August," Dr Ewan Cameron told ABC Radio Perth.
"Our best guess for that is that it's the combination of the immunity from our high vaccination rates, with some degree of immunity acquired from past infections.
"We think that, at least with BA.4 and BA.5 variants, they're not going to give us much more of a kick beyond what they already have over the past few weeks."
The WA health minister says she's doubtful the winter wave that just passed will be WA's final brush with COVID.
"I suspect there will be another wave at some point. What that is and what that looks like, we don't know," Amber-Jade Sanderson said.
WA's daily infections have been fluctuating between 3,000 to 4,000, but Dr Cameron said the modelling saw case numbers potentially trending down below 2,000 by the end of August.
The number of people in hospital with COVID has fallen from the mid-400s, with 351 cases in hospital, and the modelling suggested the drop was likely to continue and eventually settle in the high-200 range.
However, Dr Cameron admitted the modelling did not account for a number of unknowns, including the potential of new variants, and the impact of voluntary mask wearing.
"It's very difficult to assess precisely what the impact of that is, so that would be one of the uncertainties in the model," he said.
The researchers were unable to fully solve the puzzle of hospital cases rising far out of proportion with case numbers.
According to Dr Cameron, there wasn't much evidence supporting under-reporting as the reason.
"We think that there's a lot more transmission amongst elderly residents here who are the most susceptible to the virus and most likely to end up in hospital," he said.
