COVID-19 Parties A Trend In Australia: People Intentionally Get Infected With Virus

Some people in Australia have resorted to attending so-called "COVID-19 parties" in an attempt to catch the virus and build immunity, but officials have discouraged the behavior and called it "ridiculous."

The trend saw unvaccinated people deliberately exposing each other to the coronavirus instead of getting their jabs, The West Australian reported.

Some people believed that contracting COVID-19 would give them immunity, while others wanted to get infected so they can enter self-isolation now and would no longer need to spend seven days locked down at a later time in accordance with protocols, according to Yahoo News Australia.

One video on social media showed a woman from Queensland deliberately trying to get COVID-19 by sharing her coronavirus-positive daughter's glass of orange juice, a report by 7News.com.au said.

"When you’re COVID positive, and mom drinks your [orange juice] to try and get COVID ASAP so we aren’t in extended [isolation]," the video's caption read.

However, John Gerrard, the chief health officer for the state of Queensland, has called on people to stop doing such acts.

"The best way to get immunity to this virus is through vaccination, not through COVID parties, they are ridiculous so please stop them," Gerrard said Tuesday, the same day his state reported 20,566 new COVID-19 cases.

Bruce Willett, the faculty chair of Royal Australian College of General Practitioners Queensland, said that intentionally passing on or contracting the coronavirus made “no sense at all” as the behavior threatened to overwhelm medical services and the immunity it would provide was “not substantially better” than getting jabbed.

“They will still be vulnerable to getting COVID down the track. At some stage, they will need a booster like the rest of us,” Willet said.

Former deputy chief health officer Dr. Nick Coatsworth, for his part, also urged people to avoid attending "COVID-19 parties" regardless of their vaccination status.

Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, acknowledged that the idea of deliberately trying to catch the coronavirus' omicron variant is "all the rage" nowadays, but he listed several reasons why people should avoid doing it.

First, Offit dispelled the idea that omicron was nothing more than a "bad cold" and explained that it caused significant fever, body aches, swollen lymph nodes, sore throats and heavy congestion even in milder cases.

Next, the doctor explained that it was possible for someone infected to get "long COVID" -- a condition where a person develops a long-term affliction or is unable to fully recover from the virus.

Additionally, people with COVID-19 can spread the virus to children who have not been fully vaccinated, according to Offit.

The fourth reason the doctor noted was that catching any variant of the coronavirus will "keep the pandemic going and stress the health care system."

Offit then said that people should not intentionally catch COVID-19 as it was just "a bad idea" to "mess with Mother Nature."

"She's been trying to kill us ever since we crawled out of the ocean onto the land," Offit said.

Australia has reported a total of 1,042,293 COVID-19 cases and 2,416 virus-related deaths since the pandemic began, publicly available government data showed.

The U.S., meanwhile, has reported 61,732,283 coronavirus cases and 837,274 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.