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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

18 months into the pandemic, the Prime Minister has finally announced a plan for the way out... underpinned by modelling from one of our most respected scientific institutes.

The plan, which has four phases, is based on vaccination rates. It predicts we could be living a relatively normal life free of lockdowns when 80 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

But how likely are we to reach that target - and when?

Today, senior reporter for The Saturday Paper Rick Morton on the uncertainty surrounding the Prime Minister’s plan.

It’s Tuesday August 10.

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RUBY:

Rick, we're all waking up on a Tuesday morning, 18 months or so into this pandemic and the majority of the country is again in lockdown, it's pretty relentless at this point. So I think the question that we all really want answered is what exactly will it take for Australia to be able to return to normal?

RICK:

Good question. Things are bad. Let's be honest about that.

Archival tape -- Reporter 1:

“Today marks the worst day since the start of the pandemic. It's also the deadliest of the current outbreak.”

RICK:

And the fact that we're back at this point now where Victoria has gone back into lockdown.

Archival tape -- Reporter 2:

“Late this afternoon, the Premier said there was no other option but to enter lockdown number six.”

RICK:

New South Wales is still in its lockdown.

Archival tape -- Reporter 3:

“In Sydney, the Premier has given a grim assessment of the country's largest and most stubborn Covid outbreak, saying numbers could get even worse.”

RICK:

Of course, for most of the pandemic, border closures have worked to keep things relatively normal here. But that's clearly not the case anymore. And it's even more stark that we're back in these lockdowns when so much of the rest of the developed world is opening up.

Archival tape -- Reporter 4:

“Well, what a contrast. The UK is waking to Freedom Day, an easing of all Covid-19 restrictions.”

Archival tape -- Reporter 5:

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada could start allowing fully vaccinated Americans back into that country around mid August. Canada continues to lead the world in vaccination rates.”

RICK:

You know that's the problem. So national cabinet just over a week ago came up with a plan, with some evidence attached to it to hopefully get Australia out of this current crisis. Now, the question on everyone's lips is, will that plan work?

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Well, good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to be able to join you here. I’m joined, of course, by the treasurer.”

RUBY:

Hmm. OK, so can you tell me a bit more about this plan? What did we learn when it was announced a week or so ago?

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“And we are releasing today the Doherty report that was provided both to the national cabinet and, of course, the federal cabinet in releasing the national plan and the vaccination targets.”

RICK:

The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, the leader of the operation, Covid Shield, Lieutenant General John Frewen and the nation's Chief Medical Officer, Paul Kelly, all stood up at a press conference alongside the Doherty Institute's Professor Jodie McVernon, to release the evidence for a plan that national cabinet actually already came up with on July 2.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“That plan. I confirm, has four phases. The current suppression phase…”

RICK:

So what they were trying to do was give us some detail now about this four phase reopening of Australia - four phase plan to deal with Covid-19.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“And today, I want to share the expert scientific advice through our experts who are here with us today that have informed this decision to get Australia in a position where we are living with the virus. So I'll hand over to Professor McVernon…”

RICK:

Now it was a pretty weird press conference because it was more like a slideshow presentation and the text on the slides was actually really tiny.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“And there's a presentation that I believe will be on screen concurrently.”

RICK:

So it was hard for journalists to see what was going on even while it was happening.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“Next slide please. This slide is a critical conceptual slide that really brings together all of the key messages of that work in a single graphic.”

RICK:

And, of course, the information hadn't been provided to them before the press conference started. So it actually took until much later on before people started to really get into the detail of the plan itself.

RUBY:

OK, so what are the details, Rick? What are the targets? What are the triggers?

RICK:

Right. So most of this revolves around Australia's vaccination rates. It's now largely accepted, of course, based on increasing evidence from around the world and here in Australia that vaccines are the way out of this.

Even if they don't completely stop case numbers, they do severely limit serious illness hospitalisations and deaths. And that's where the focus needs to shift.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“That under Phase A at the present time, lockdown's should be optimally early, stringent and short.”

RICK:

Right now, we're in phase A.

To get out of phase A and into phase B, we need to hit 70% of our eligible population being fully vaccinated.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“As we reach 70 and 80% at the need for long, stringent measures across the whole of states or across extended areas we believe will be substantively reduced.”

RICK:

Now, remember, eligible means 16 plus. So this is the adult population. So in terms of the actual total number of people who will be vaccinated at this juncture, it's just 56%.

RUBY:

Right. OK, so a target of 70% vaccination to enter phase B of the adult population. But what does that actually mean? What changes would happen under phase B? What would life be like?

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Lockdowns in phase B. Are less likely, but they are possible.”

RICK:

So in phase B, theoretically, lockdowns are far less likely, but they still remain possible. Social restrictions will be lighter, and at this stage, Australians stranded overseas who are fully vaccinated could arrive back home.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“We will ease restrictions in phase B on vaccinated residents. The details of that are still to be worked through. They’re still to be determined.”

RICK:

They want to expand the caps on those numbers and also maybe give a bit more freedom to Australians who are fully vaccinated in Australia to be exempted from some of the restrictions that might still apply to people who are not vaccinated.

RUBY:

OK, then, so what is next in the plan? What is phase C and when would we hit that?

RICK:

So phase C reached is when we hit 80% of the eligible population fully vaccinated.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“When we reach 80%, we will move into phase C, we will abolish caps on returning vaccinated Australians. We will lift all restrictions on outbound travel for vaccinated Australians.”

RICK:

The Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, said that lockdown's would be almost non-existent in this phase, but if they did happen, they would be highly targeted. Again, we don't really know what that means.

Archival tape -- Scott Morrison:

“There will be a gradual reopening of inward and outbound international travel with safe countries, safe countries, those that are and have the same sort of vaccination levels that Australia has.”

RICK:

Now, this is when things get somewhat closer to pre pandemic life. You know, there's a phase after this one which is actually completely back to normal. This is phase D where things are pretty much exactly back to the way they were before Covid-19 ever became a glint in our eyes so to speak. And that means international borders can reopen. But that's a long, long way off.

RUBY:

Mm and it does seem a little hard to imagine that at this point, to be honest. But I think the big and obvious question here is for all of these stages, how likely are we to reach them? Where are we at now in terms of our vaccination targets? How far off are we from 70 to 80% vaccination rates?

RICK:

So right now, only about 20% of the eligible population is fully vaccinated. So we have a long way to go until we hit the 80% figure.

On current projections. And that's, you know, based on how the rate of vaccinations is travelling at the moment, we can actually hit 70% fully vaccinated by the end of November and maybe, maybe 80% just before Christmas.

But that relies on a lot of assumptions. We might actually get there earlier. We might get there later or we might actually not get there at all.

There are a lot of questions hovering over this plan and some of it's just beyond our foresight. We don't know if there are going to be more dangerous variants than the Delta variant, even though that seems quite likely. We don't know how people are going to change their behaviour or not, particularly if this drags on. We don't know whether all of the state and territory and federal governments are going to continue to cooperate. And we don't know whether the immunity from the vaccines we do have is long lasting or not and at what stage boosters might need to be considered.

All of that stuff is up in the air right now, and we can only really discover the answers to that by living it through experience.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Rick, we're talking about the vaccination rates that would be needed for us to start living close to how we used to before the pandemic. There are some targets and there are some projections about when we could get there. But there also seems to be a lot of assumptions and a lot of uncertainties still underpinning this. So can you tell me a bit more about that, about these factors that we need to take into consideration?

RICK:

Well, the targets and triggers, they're based on modelling. And it's really good modelling. It's very rigorous. It's conducted by the sharpest minds in the country and led by Jodie McVernon from the Doherty Institute. And she, like, implored others to see the modelling as this kind of hypothetical scenario.

Yes, they modelled each scenario 100 different times with, you know, full access to as much data as anyone’s got in the country. But they are just models at the end of the day.

Now, some of the political action that's been taken on the back of this modelling is kind of relying on the most optimistic scenarios. And even then, the modelling itself may change if there's another more virulent version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. So there's you know a lot of what ifs.

And if we do reach 80% vaccination rates, states still can, you know, decide to lock down if they want to, particularly in subgroup populations where the vaccination coverage may not have reached yet.

I mean, the other thing about these models is they're uneven. They're assuming that all of this stuff is happening at a uniform, kind of in a uniform way across the country. When that's not the case, that's not reality at all. Some states do better than others.

So what this actually means is that phase C and D were endorsed by national cabinet. In fact, all phases where they came up the phases before the modelling. But there is still no modelling to support phase C and D.

RUBY:

Right. So in essence then, the two most important phases, the ones that would make the most difference, C and D, where we would actually be able to see some freedom of movement, there's no modelling at all that actually underpins those. So why is that?

RICK:

So Jodie McVernon who's a director at the Doherty Institute, she said during an online press briefing late last Tuesday that the reason the modelling stops where it does is because they just cannot possibly come up with any scenario that might seem realistic.

Archival tape -- Rick Morton:

“Um it’s is Rick Morton from The Saturday Paper. Thanks for having me. All of the modelling is about getting us from from A to B and then B to C? I can't. And I might have missed it, so forgive me, but I can't see what will get us to D. Is there any indication in the modelling about what that would take?”

RICK:

And she said, you know, if you looked at the last six months, a lot has changed.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“So I guess the reason we stopped where we did was we said six months is a long time in this pandemic.”

RICK:

You know what we've evaluated and assessed is how far we think we could get with 80% vaccine coverage based on the current circulating strains and assuming the population stays on board with behavioural measures.

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“Beyond that we think it’s just too hard to know what will be happening in the external context.”

RICK:

And that's what they’ve modelled, six months. So really, the only detail we've got is getting from phase A to phase B.

Archival tape -- Rick Morton:

“But D’s not going to happen next year from the sounds of it?”

RICK:

And I actually pressed her on this, I said so that means obviously we're not getting to phase D next year. And she kind of half chuckled and smiled and said

Archival tape -- Jodie McVernon:

“We declined to make an assessment for phase D and I think the Prime Minister was happy that we had good grounds for saying that.”

RUBY:

Right. So what does it mean then Rick, to have a plan that is based on so much uncertainty? Because I think obviously we're all pretty desperate for a way out and we've been asking to know what the plan is. But what does it mean when much of the modelling for the first part of it is so uncertain and there's no modelling at all for the second part of it? Is this something that we can kind of rely on?

RICK:

I mean, look, to be fair, we needed a plan. We're 18 months into this thing and people were starting to ask, OK, look, we've done as much as we can for as long as we can to kind of ride this thing out. But we do need to know that there is at least a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Right. That we do need to know that there will come a time where we aren’t locked in our houses for half the year. What we want is to know that our governments, state and federal, are working on a plan through vaccination, which is really the hero of this whole project.

Now, that's not the same then again, as saying that we have all of the details about the way out because we don't, some of that is because it would be silly to model some of that. But equally, I mean, these phases were announced before we had any evidence to back them up. So it does feel like, particularly the Prime Minister is treading a really fine line, I guess, between allowing people to have a little bit of hope and also perhaps making something that might be construed as a false promise, particularly about phase D, because there's just no word. I mean, that's not happening any, any time soon at all.

And as Jodie McVernon says, there is no Freedom Day.

RUBY:

There’s no Freedom Day?

RICK:

Not right now. We can't tell you, you know, when life goes back to normal and that's kind of where we're at.

We just need to get the vax numbers up. I mean, crucially, what this modelling does show is that vaccination does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of suppressing case numbers. And so that's the only thing that we can do is get vaccinated. And it's a relatively simple thing for Australia to do. So, you know, if there's any light at the end of the tunnel, that's it.

The future is in our hands somewhat now.

RUBY:

Rick, thanks so much for your time.

RICK:

Thanks Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Regional Victoria’s lockdown ended at 11.59pm last night, after the Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said that there was no sign of Covid-19 transmission into the regions. Outside of Melbourne the state has reverted back to the restrictions that were in place before the recent lockdown began, meaning that students can return to school and venues can reopen with strict density limits.

Premier Dan Andrews warned Melburnians not to try to leave the city. He said that police will be monitoring the border between metropolitan and regional Victoria and handing out fines to those attempting to violate restrictions.

And NSW recorded 283 new local Covid-19 cases yesterday, with the Tamworth region in the state's North West the latest area to enter a seven-day lockdown.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. I’ll see you tomorrow.

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