ACT chief health officer Kerryn Coleman wants to be able to stop daily COVID case numbers

Dr Kerryn Coleman said she expected COVID would continue to be a challenge and there would be more waves. Authorities were focused on protecting the most vulnerable.

The latest COVID-19 wave in the ACT has likely passed its peak and experts have suggested people will be better protected against further waves due to increased immunity from both infections and vaccines.

Dr Coleman spoke to The Canberra Times on the one-year anniversary of the ACT being plunged into lockdown after recording the first positive Delta COVID case.

While one case resulted in a lockdown on this day last year and set off more than two months' worth of press conferences about daily case numbers, Dr Coleman said she felt daily numbers were less important.

"I'd like to move to a position where we're not reporting daily numbers, I think there is a level of elevated anxiety that probably doesn't achieve what we need it to achieve with everyday numbers, particularly at a point where we're coming down or actually looking at a stable period," she said.

"We can consider the level of information and how we increase that information in response to any increasing threats or concerns that we have but we don't report daily numbers for any other condition that we monitor."

Case numbers in the ACT have dropped over recent weeks. The current seven-day rolling average is 532 cases down from a peak of 1309 last month.

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Dr Coleman said there would continue to be further COVID-19 waves but could not say what impact this would have.

"We are likely going to see more waves of this, I can't tell you if that's going to be in six months, nine months or two months," Dr Coleman said.

"What is becoming clear is that ... the immune landscape is very complex. So this mixture of the impact of the vaccine, as well as past infection, increases complexity every time.

"We're also able to keep that balance, there's still a lot of work to do but we're certainly in a much more balanced way of being able to continue life right now.

"So we know that we get a season of flu every winter, it's possible that COVID might play out, it's possible we might look at getting two waves a year, we just really don't know because it hasn't settled into what we think it's going to be."

Australian National University infectious diseases expert Peter Collignon said he was "cautiously optimistic" that Canberra and Australia had passed through the worst of COVID.

He said he believed about three-quarters of Australians had been infected with the virus, and those infections coupled with high vaccination rates, had increased immunity.

"A lot of people have now got what we call hybrid immunity. So you've been vaccinated and you got an infection ... that immunity from getting a vaccine with an infection afterwards seems to give you much better long-lasting protection including against hospitalisation and death," Professor Collignon said.

The current BA.5 Omicron wave is likely to have peaked and Professor Collignon said there were no indications of any strains that were likely to take the place of BA.5.

Professor Collignon said while COVID case numbers, hospitalisations and deaths had been higher over recent months, Australia had done comparatively well.

"[The recent wave has] been associated with a reasonable amount of deaths and people in hospital but by the same token I think we have got to remember that the ACT is probably one of the most vaccinated places in the world as a city," he said.

"But even Australia wide, we are in a much better position than most other countries as measured by deaths and hospitalisation, which I think are the most important because if you look at most of Europe, US, Canada, you know, Germany, Scandinavia, even, they've had a lot more cases that have resulted in hospitalisation and death.

"So we've still got a death rate that six or seven times lower than the US, even though we've now per population had about the same amount of spread of COVID."

The ACT has recorded 108 deaths of people with COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. A death of a woman in her 60s was reported on Thursday.

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