It's been a while since we stopped properly tracking COVID-19 cases, but evidence suggests that numbers are climbing. And with many of us lacking a booster shot in the last six months, more Australians are finding themselves in hospital with the condition.
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00:00 Well, they've been on the rise for a few weeks now, but really big uptick last week, just
00:07 on the latest figures. By the way, the government is now stopping weekly reporting on COVID.
00:12 It's now going to be monthly. So 23% increase on the seven day daily average of cases. Now,
00:19 you don't really know what's happening truly because we're not getting systematic testing
00:23 going on. And perhaps the more reflective benchmark is hospitalisations. So hospitalisations
00:29 are indeed also up about 17.5% on a national basis. And deaths are sort of static at about
00:38 five or six a day. So it's still a lot of people dying, but deaths will in fact lag.
00:44 So you should see an uptick, unfortunately, of deaths in the next three or four weeks
00:49 because people get sick, they don't get better and so on. Emergency department presentations
00:54 are up. And the interesting statistic there is one in two of people who turn up in an
01:00 emergency department with COVID get admitted to hospital. So we're talking about a significant
01:04 burden on the system. On any day, it's probably between 12 and 1300 people in hospital nationally.
01:11 Is this a new strain of COVID then, a new variant?
01:15 It's not a new variant, well it's newish. So it's based on New South Wales data, it's
01:20 probably a little bit different from state to state. Omicron descendants dominate here.
01:29 The technical terms, EG5, XBB, they provide the dominant groups of sub-variants. You've
01:37 probably heard of Eris, they've got Greek names attached to them. But by and large,
01:41 it's not entirely new variants coming out. There was one they were worried about, BA2.86,
01:49 which wasn't Omicron, it went right back to the BA2 from what seems like a century ago
01:54 and bypassed Omicron and they were worried about that. I think there's only been six
01:58 cases of BA2.86, at least measured in the samples that they've got. So that doesn't
02:03 seem to be a huge issue, at least at this stage.
02:05 Right. And is there a link between the increase in the number of people being hospitalised
02:10 with COVID and vaccination rates?
02:13 Yes, would have to be the answer to that question. Only 53% of over 65s in Australia have had
02:22 their six month booster. In other words, a booster within six months of their last booster
02:27 dose. And it's about 66% of people in residential aged care. So there's still a lot of people
02:33 under immunised. Now, to be fair, some of those people will have had COVID and that's
02:38 the reason they haven't had their booster, but some of them won't. And then if that's
02:42 the rate in people aged over 65, who are amongst the most at risk people, then it's going to
02:49 be even lower rates and younger. So there are people around who are at risk. Counter
02:55 to that is that the rate of prescribing of antivirals is going up along, so it's paralleling
03:01 the rise in COVID cases. So there's a lot of evidence pointing in the same direction.
03:06 There's a real rise in COVID cases, hospitalisations and antiviral prescriptions are all on the
03:11 rise. Last month, Norman, the health officials announced that COVID-19 was no longer a communicable
03:17 disease incident of national significance. Now, what does that mean? How significant
03:23 is that? Well, it's, depends who you ask. You can understand why they might want to
03:29 do it to reduce the administrative burden of having to notify this communicable disease
03:34 of national significance. On the other hand, it's still around. We're lucky at the moment
03:39 that these are variants which don't seem to be any more harmful, although we do get infected
03:45 and people do get sick and people do die. But if we relax too much and think it's all
03:51 over, if a nasty variant emerges, we'll get caught unawares.
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