Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly says he does not expect long COVID to impact Australians in the same way the debilitating condition has played out overseas, despite a lack of data that has sparked a Parliamentary inquiry.
“I recognise that there are people out there with long-term symptoms. But it remains to be seen how that will play out in the Australian situation,” Kelly said.
Asked if allowing COVID-19 to spread would increase the incidence of long COVID, Kelly said Australia was “in quite a different situation to most of the rest of the world” because of the lockdowns that enabled most people to get vaccinated before they caught the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
“The major risk factors for long COVID are having had infection before vaccination, being unvaccinated, having severe illness and having other types of COVID that were not Omicron,” he said.
“For the majority of Australians, we were not exposed to COVID before we had at least two vaccine [doses].“
Health Minister Mark Butler has asked Kelly to come up with a national plan for dealing with COVID-19 and the chief medical officer said the health department was “doing some very in-depth data work with Victoria”.
“But so far, when we started to look at every piece of data that we have in the Commonwealth, we’re not seeing a major picture of long COVID,” he said.
Kelly said the parliamentary committee investigating long COVID and repeat infections, chaired by Labor MP Dr Mike Freelander, would help unearth more information.
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