‘Covid Zero’ Risks Being ‘Covid Limbo’ Amid Slow Vaccine Uptake

“Covid zero” countries that used strict border controls to keep the coronavirus largely at bay for more than a year risk being stuck in limbo and increasingly isolated unless vaccination rates pick up, public health experts said.

A protective bubble that’s kept Australia’s Covid-19 fatalities to less than 1,000 is unsustainable, Greg Dore, an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist with the University of New South Wales’ Kirby Institute in Sydney, told a Bloomberg panel. The country needs to overcome complacency and ramp up immunizations to reach “disease immunity,” where SARS-CoV-2 no longer poses a major threat, he said during a QuickTake discussion broadcast live on Twitter Thursday.