A lot more detailed planning is needed to ensure Western Australia's hospital system can cope with a COVID-19 case surge, an inquiry has heard.
WA has maintained tough borders restrictions in a bid to eliminate the virus and trails the rest of the nation in vaccination rates.
While other states are talking about freeing up travel and people movement at a 70 per cent full vaccination rate, the WA government is less enthusiastic.
Federal health department boss Brendan Murphy told a Senate hearing on Friday there was "a lot more planning to be done yet" in terms of preparing WA for an outbreak.
"There's very good leadership there that we're working closely with," Professor Murphy said.
"We haven't got detailed planning yet."
He said neither federal nor WA health officials would be "confident in opening the situation" until they were collectively confident the right plans were in place.
WA officials were working with the national cabinet on "what they believe a 'living with COVID environment' could be", Prof Murphy said.
"We haven't landed that yet but I'm sure we will."
He said pressure on the WA hospital system was not COVID-related, but rather was "general hospital demand pressures".
"They attribute that to a larger-than-normal number of complex long-stay patients with non-COVID conditions."
Health Minister Greg Hunt said the federal government had confidence in all of the states and territories' preparedness.
Mr Hunt said since February 2020 there had been a national program to secure more ventilators, protective equipment and train health personnel, as well as preparing the private health system as a backup.
But he said there was "always the capacity for additional investment at state level".
"I know that we have increased by 72 per cent our investment in Western Australia hospitals and they have increased it by 18 (per cent), so we would encourage and support them to move towards that investment at our level," he said.
Meanwhile, the West Australian newspaper reports updated modelling from the Doherty Institute shows five or six WA residents could die of COVID-19 each day for six months if the border opened to NSW at 70 per cent vaccination coverage.
The modelling is on the agenda at a national cabinet meeting on Friday.
