Epidemiologist Michael Baker says tough isolation rules around Omicron cases should ease once the outbreak takes hold in the community.
Household contacts of a positive case could end up isolating for 24 days.
There are warnings this will be unworkable, and severely affect essential workers.
Professor Baker told Morning Report that we are still treating omicron like delta and trying to trace cases - and that's appropriate until cases really take off.
"That's the right thing to do while numbers are small, that will really delay the take-off of this outbreak.
"But later on, when Omicron is everywhere, it's quite reasonable, in fact, it's the right thing to do is to relax the isolation requirements."
Baker said for positive cases the shortest he would recommend is around seven days, two days longer than the current five days recommended in the United States.
He said this was because while the incubation period of Omicron is around three days, the tail of infection is reasonably long.
The first ones to have shortened isolation times should be those in essential industries, particularly healthcare, he said.
"With these essential industries, you have this balancing act. We're trying to stamp out, dampen down transmission, the same time, you have to get these essential workers back, particularly in the healthcare sector.
"After all, if a person doesn't have symptoms, they're probably less infectious, they are wearing PPE in the hospital sector. This is what's been done overseas - shortening that isolation period."
