Australians admitted to hospital from COVID-19 neared record levels on Wednesday as authorities urged businesses to let staff work from home and advised people to wear masks indoors and get emergency booster shots amid a major outbreak.
Australia is in the grip of a third Omicron wave, driven by the highly portable new sub-variants, BA.4 and BA.5, with more than 300,000 cases reported in the past seven days, although authorities have noted that the actual number could double. Tuesday’s 50,000 cases were the highest in two months.
“We need to do some things differently at least for a short period of time,” Australia’s chief medical officer Paul Kelly told ABC Radio on Wednesday as he predicted the number of people ending up in hospital would soon hit an all-time high your all-time high.
“We know that working from home is a very key component in stopping what we call the macro spread.”
About 5,300 Australians are currently in hospital with COVID-19, not far off the record 5,390 recorded in January during the BA.1 outbreak, official figures show. The numbers in the states of Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia are now the highest since the start of the pandemic.
Support for workers but not mandates
But Kelly said he did not recommend reinstating mask mandates or other restrictions.
Last week, Australia reinstated support payments for temporary workers who have to be quarantined due to COVID-19 after more workers started calling in sick. Several front-line health workers are also sick or in isolation, further straining the health system.
Authorities also warned of a backlog of people getting booster shots, exacerbating the health crisis.
So far, 95 per cent of over-16s have received two doses, helping to keep Australia’s total number of COVID-19 cases at just under nine million and deaths at 10,845, far fewer than many countries. But only about 71 percent received three or more doses.
LISTEN | Latest sub-variants:
Front Burner21:33 The latest sub-variants of COVID: What you need to know
Omicron’s BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants are spreading rapidly. They already make up the majority of new COVID infections in the US and appear to be much better at circumventing immunity. Research from Harvard Medical School shows that the BA.5 subvariant “can evade antibody responses. The spread of these sub-variants coincided with the lifting of mask mandates and the easing of many public health measures across the country. To bring you details on the latest variants of COVID-19 and the state of the pandemic here in Canada heading into summer, we’re joined once again by Dr. Zane Chagla, an infectious disease physician at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton.
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