Travellers on Canberra's public transport network will no longer need to wear face masks from Friday, as the territory's COVID-19 emergency period comes to an end after more than two years.
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Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the pandemic was not over and while the global community was transitioning to treating COVID as an infectious disease like many others, it was not quite ready to relax all remaining rules.
"The ending of the public health emergency formally is, in some ways, significant, but in other ways it is just part of the transition that we've been making over time. At the same time, we're implementing a COVID-19 management declaration that enables us to keep in place many of the same measures that we've got currently," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
From Friday, household contacts will no longer need to report their status to ACT Health and Canberra businesses and events will not need to hold COVID safety plans.
A vaccine mandate for workers in aged-care facilities and disability care settings will be dropped.
The government will now leave it up to employers whether they wish to require up-to-date COVID-19 vaccination coverage among their workers.
Ms Stephen-Smith said the removal of the vaccine mandate in those settings reflected updated health advice that the vaccinations do not provide significant protection against a person passing on a COVID-19 infection from one of the virus' more recent variants.
However, the Health Minister stressed the continued importance of vaccines in preventing severe disease from a COVID-19 infection.
People who test positive to COVID-19 in the ACT will need to continue reporting their positive result to ACT Health and isolating for five days, and not attend high-risk settings on the sixth and seventh day after testing positive for the virus.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet on Thursday said he would push to have mandatory isolation periods dropped when national cabinet met on Friday.
Ms Stephen-Smith said the five-day isolation period would remain "for the moment" and there would need to be a judgement call on what reducing that period would mean for the community
"If the outcome of it is to increase the number of cases in the community and increase the number of people who have to stay home, it's not going to have the kind of positive workforce impact that I think Premier Perrottet has been talking about," she said.
"What we really don't want to see at this point is an escalation of cases in the community. We know there are still groups of people in our community who are more vulnerable to severe disease with COVID-19, who are continuing to isolate and keep themselves separate from society, and another escalation of COVID numbers will further increase anxiety and social isolation for those people."
Ms Stephen-Smith said Canberrans had continued to abide by public health advice and rules, and said more people staying at home while they were sick would continue to limit the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases.
"We have - and people know that we have - no way of actually enforcing many of these requirements. People are doing it on their own bat, on their own good will because they understand it is part of their obligation as a community member to not only protect themselves and their family but to protect the wider community from the potential for disease transmission," she said.
Opening hours at the ACT government's COVID-19 testing clinics will be shortened from Saturday, while the Kambah drive-through testing centre to close permanently at 4pm on Friday
The testing centre at the Garran surge centre will be open every day from 10am to 6.30pm; the Mitchell drive-through testing centre will open daily from 8am to 2pm; and the walk-in centre at Holt will be open daily from 8am to 4pm.
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Jasper Lindell
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
Jasper Lindell joined The Canberra Times in 2018. He is a Legislative Assembly reporter, covering ACT politics and government. He also writes about development, transport, heritage, local history, literature and the arts, as well as contributing to the Times' Panorama magazine. He was previously a Sunday Canberra Times reporter.
