Australia warned: Covid cases could hit six figures a day
Australia has been warned Covid cases could reach six figures a day as the nation moves into a new phase of the pandemic.
NSW
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Australia has been warned Covid cases could hit six figures a day, as the prime minister backflipped on a testing rule just 24 hours after it was announced.
Monash University infectious disease modeller Dr Michael Lydeamore gave the prediction following Friday’s spike in NSW cases from 12,226 to 21,151 in just 24 hours. The cases then rose to 22,577 on Saturday.
Dr Lydeamore said by the end of the month “it was entirely feasible” that national case numbers could hit more than 100,000 a day. He added that even though testing numbers are high, they are “probably only capturing around 70 to 80 per cent of cases”.
He said as Australia moves into a new phase of the pandemic, modellers will begin to look at doing short-term Covid forecast numbers, just one to two weeks ahead, like a weather report.
On Thursday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that positive cases isolating for seven days must take a rapid antigen test (RAT) on day six. It would have to be negative before they could leave isolation. Yesterday afternoon he scrapped the requirement.
Earlier on Friday NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said his message “for people across our state is that if you are not required to be tested with a PCR test, don’t line up, because you’ll be taking the place of somebody who is required by NSW Health to receive that PCR test”.
People wanting tests today will find many centres closed, in an effort to help staff in pathology laboratories clear the backlog of swabs.
Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital said it had closed its testing clinic “until further notice” with Northern Sydney Local Health District apologising in a Facebook post and saying: “This decision was made to ease pressure on pathology labs and allow them to clear a backlog of swabs.”
Other clinics in the district closed at noon yesterday and will close early again on Saturday.
The post said that Northern Sydney Local Health District had been collecting 6000 swabs a day across clinics and hospital operations since the start of the holiday period.
This figure was up from 1000 a day in the weeks earlier.
Director of Medtech Services in the Hunter and Newcastle area, Nick Burns said only two of its 13 testing sites will open next week. He said it was the responsible approach because otherwise people would be waiting five or more days for results, which was not fair.
He said the situation could not be resolved by more testing sites and staff and numbers are now so huge, the only way to increase capacity was to buy more testing machines, and they were made overseas.
“All the labs are scrambling to get more machines,” Mr Burns said. “But it’s not easy getting anything these days.”
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard yesterday again emphasised the importance of vaccination by highlighting that 39 of the 69 people with Covid in ICU in NSW were not jabbed.
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