CANBERRA, April 23 (Xinhua) -- As COVID-19 restrictions were further eased in Australia, some Australian epidemiologists believed public health response and preparedness are still needed to tackle the pandemic.

"I think Australia did well up until the middle of last year. And then towards the end of 2021, everybody seemed to give up," Professor Mike Toole from the Burnet Institute told Xinhua.

"That began in New South Wales where they eased all the restrictions, and soon after the other states followed, and you can see that 2022 has seen by far the biggest epidemic in Australia since the pandemic began," he said.

Australia recorded about 5.37 million cases of COVID-19 since the pandemic started, of which close to 5 million were reported in less than four months this year, and two thirds of all the deaths have been recorded in 2022, he noted.

Citing the number of nearly 51,000 cases reported on Wednesday, he stressed that it was about 9 percent of the world's single-day total, making Australia, with a population of only 25 million, high up on the list of countries with big COVID numbers.

"We've been averaging about 200 deaths a week, which is a lot more than people who die on the roads, or from suicides," said Toole.

"They've been told that Omicron is mild ... But when you have a lot of cases, a small percentage of a large number is still a large number," he added.

Australia used to take strict measures to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. More than half of its population were put into lockdown last winter, and its second largest city Melbourne saw the world's longest lockdown with more than 260 days.

However, the number of cases surged from the beginning of this year after restrictions were lifted. Official statistics showed that as of Thursday afternoon, Australia reported more than 54,000 new cases in the past 24 hours, while the death toll stood at 6,893.

On Friday, Australia's two populous states New South Wales and Victoria further eased restrictions, allowing close contacts to be exempt from quarantine of seven days.

Another leading epidemiologist, Professor Nancy Baxter, who heads the University of Melbourne's School of Population and Global Health, said that the move would mean the country would not be able to reduce its daily case tally recently.

"Right now in Australia, basically, the ideas being promoted is that this will be similar to the flu, and will have yearly surges and will have a yearly vaccination program, and we'll get to live with the virus. That's unlikely to be the reality," she told Xinhua.

"We're going to have further waves related to new variants," she said. "Yet we don't have the kind of public health response. We don't have the education of the public to make sure that they're aware of that and prepared for that."

She said that there's been thought of the variants going to get milder, which was not based on any evidence. "It's not necessarily going to be less serious and milder," she added.

Toole said countries need good surveillance and flexibility on easing and reimposing restrictions depending on severity of the pandemic, and easy access to tests, free of charge.

"They're not free in Australia. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is free, but rapid antigen tests are not free," he added.

Baxter gave similar suggestions. "You have to prepare the public that we may need to reimpose some of the protective measures."

She also recognized waste water detection as a useful measure to monitor COVID-19 cases.

The professor had earlier warned in a report by The Canberra Times that the shift in governments' reporting focus of the pandemic from case numbers to lives lost would have the effect of "masking" the true impact of the virus on the community.

"It will make COVID less salient in the community's mind -- which is fine if the aim is to have no one paying attention to COVID, but what it won't do is change the fact people are dying or emerging with long COVID every day and that we could be preventing that," she said. Enditem

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