National Cabinet has agreed Australians will no longer have to isolate after testing positive for COVID-19 form October 14.

Chief medical officer Paul Kelly says the decision marks the likely end of the emergency pandemic response.

State and federal authorities also agreed to continue offering financial support for some workers to be able to isolate if needed. 

The decision will see a shift from government rules-based approaches to embedded responses in infection control and work safe practices. 

However, Professor Jeremy Nicholson - Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Health Sciences and Director of the Australian National Phenome Centre at Murdoch University - says it is important to acknowledged the remaining risks. 

"There is a generally held assumption that the COVID-19 pandemic is behind us, and we need to get back to ‘normal’, whatever that means,” Dr Nicholson says. 

“That assumption is highly dependent on your social or political viewpoint and your exact location on the planet Earth.

“From a scientific point of view, there is no evidence whatsoever that we are yet through the evolution and development of the virus, and the general lack of testing does not help us much with estimating true transmission rates and in many cases even disease prevalence.

“Vaccination rates are also waning and therefore population immunity is steadily dropping. 

“Hospitalisation rates are a good measure of the impact of the disease, and it is true that this has dropped substantially in many places, there is however no guarantee that this will continue as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.”

He says the effects of the pandemic will linger for a long time. 

“We now know fairly certainly that up to about 20 per cent of people who have had COVID-19, often with only mild acute effects, will go on to suffer from Long COVID symptoms which can persist for years.

“These problems long term will cost billions or even trillions of dollars worldwide, because COVID acts as an inflammatory accelerant for existing sub-clinical pathologies that increase the chances of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and a range of neurological problems - these are now well-established facts based on studies on millions of people and published in top science and medicine journals.

“The idea that COVID isolation can be dropped because the pandemic is behind us supports the erroneous conclusion that COVID-19 is a mild disease and there is nothing for us to worry about. 

“COVID-19 is still a dangerous long-term health threat. 

“Political wishful thinking and selective use of scientific data have been the cause of many of the world's COVID-related problems over the last couple of years - and even though the world has taken such a huge knock, it seems that the lessons will never be learned.”

He says one particular message from the COVID-19 response remains highly relevant - get vaccinated. 

“I am going to get my 5th vaccination soon (the one that is tuned for Omicron BA4 and BA5 sub-variants) not because I am worried about BA4/5 per se, but because I don’t know what BA6, 7 and 8 will do to me if and when they appear.”