COVID-19 hospitalization rates in New South Wales (NSW) could plateau next week, a top health official said yesterday, as Australia’s most populous state suffered record deaths from the virus for a third day.
The country is experiencing its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic, with more than 100,000 cases being posted daily, fueled by the now dominant Omicron strain of SARS-CoV-2, which makes up about 90 percent of cases and two-thirds of ICU admissions in New South Wales.
Pressure on hospitals are likely to remain for “the next few weeks,” New South Wales Deputy Secretary of Health Susan Pearce said, although hospitalization numbers were tracking better than the best-case scenario in an official modeling a week ago.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“That is pleasing, but that plateauing is obviously still at a relatively high level of COVID patients in our hospitals and in our” intensive care, Pearce told a media briefing in Sydney, the state capital.
The surge in cases fueled by the Omicron variant has piled pressure on hospitals, which are grappling with record admissions, and on other sectors of the economy.
With staff shortages beginning to disrupt supply chains, authorities have eased quarantine rules to allow thousands of close contacts of cases to return to work in the transport and freight industries if they are asymptomatic, an extension of exemptions that had earlier applied to food production staff.
However, this has raised fears workers would be placed in riskier environments.
“Essential workers are being forced to put themselves in harm’s way to keep food on the shelves, medicines in stock, the lights and water on and keep this country open for business,” Australian Council of Trade Unions secretary Sally McManus said in a statement.
Australia successfully restricted outbreaks of COVID-19 for most of the pandemic, but it now finds itself in the grip of a wave driven by the Omicron variant following the relaxation of restrictions when vaccinations became widespread.
Of Australia’s nearly 1.4 million infections recorded since the pandemic began, about 1.2 million have been detected over the past four weeks.
New South Wales yesterday reported a total of 63,018 new COVID-19 cases, although 37,938 of those came from home rapid antigen tests, an unspecified number of which had been taken in the previous week and reported later.
The addition of the home tests to official case numbers by state governments has distorted the count in recent days.
In Victoria, the second-most populous state, the government is more cautious about the outlook, despite new cases remaining stable in recent days.
The state yesterday recorded 34,836 new infections, 15,440 of which were from home rapid antigen tests.
“I don’t have advice yet that we’ve reached the peak of the wave of this omicron variant, and it is something we’re looking at daily, hourly in terms of the impact on our hospital system,” Victoria Acting Minister of Health James Merlino said.
Australia reported 56 deaths by mid-day yesterday, with 29 of them in New South Wales, its biggest ever COVID-19 toll.
Other parts of Australia, largely virus-free until early last month, are also hitting record caseloads. A month ago, Queensland reported a day with four new cases; yesterday, it recorded 23,630, a state record.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
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