Living with Delta Covid variant not an option until more are vaccinated: ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith

Rachel Stephen-Smith said allowing the Delta variant of the coronavirus to circulate in the community was not an option. She said this would cause the health system to be overrun.

"What we particularly know about the Delta strain is that you can't have a managed outbreak. That's not the way this virus works," Ms Stephen-Smith said on ABC Canberra.

"At this point, without widespread vaccination it's not an option because we would see too many people in hospital, we would see our health system overrun."

Senior ministers in the NSW government are having discussions about whether or not to accept the virus circulating in the community, The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Thursday.

It came after NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard said on Wednesday that if people in Sydney did not adhere to the lockdown the state may be forced to live with the virus.

"At some point we're going to move to a stage where we're going to have to accept that the virus has a life which will continue in the community," Mr Hazzard said.

But Ms Stephen-Smith said she would be very surprised if NSW decided to take this approach.

"Brad speaks his mind, he speaks frankly, all of us in public life who have been speaking about this for 18 months sometimes may say something in a way that we wish we might have phrased it differently," she said.

"I would be very surprised if NSW went down this path, it is absolutely clear that every other state in the country would close their borders to NSW if they let the virus run."

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian also poured cold water on those suggestions in a press conference on Friday morning.

"No state or nation or any country on the planet can live with the Delta variant when our vaccination rates are so low," Ms Berejiklian said.

"Because if we chose to live with this while the rates of vaccinations are at 9 per cent, we will see thousands and thousands of hospitalisations and death."

Greater Sydney and surrounding regions are under lockdown until at least next Friday. ACT residents who have been in the Greater Sydney area are in the past 14 days are also under stay-at-home orders.

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Regional NSW also has restrictions limiting the number of people in homes and restaurants and masks are mandatory.

Ms Stephen-Smith said she believed that NSW needed to sustain its current level of restrictions until it was ahead of the virus.

"They've caught up but they are not ahead of the virus yet, they're still seeing everyday new cases where people were out in the community during their infectious period.

"They need to get to a point where every new case is someone who has already been identified as a contact, already been in quarantine, hasn't been infectious in the community and we're not seeing new exposure sites."

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