SA daily Covid update: 3493 Covid-19 cases, 125 in hospital

South Australia has recorded 3493 new cases of Covid-19, as the Premier reveals a grim statistic about the state’s ICU patients.

South Australia has reported 3493 new cases of Covid-19, as the Premier revealed 50 per cent of the Covid patients in ICU were unvaccinated.

There are 125 people in hospital with Covid — the overall Covid numbers and hospitalisations representing just a “slight uptight”.

“It’s certainly not the rapid rise we’ve seen in other jurisdictions,” Premier Steven Marshall added.

There was no increase in intensive care presentations or the number of people on ventilators, with 12 people in the ICU and one on a ventilator.

Half of those in the ICU are unvaccinated, which Premier Steven Marshall called a “massive, massive over-representation of the general population”.

“That’s proof we need that vaccination is absolutely critical,” he said.

Mr Marshall said sometime within the next week, South Australia was likely to move to rapid antigen tests for close contacts, leaving PCR tests for those with symptoms.

On rapid tests, Mr Marshall said a “big shipment” had arrived today and South Australia was “expecting about a million rapid antigen tests for use within the state system every single week from now on”.

“We will be providing ours to close contacts throughout our system probably within the next week,” Mr Marshall said.

“But here are other people that will want them for other reasons — surveillance before they go to work, before they visit somebody — that won’t be a part of the system.”

He added: “I’ve got no tolerance whatsoever for people that are price gouging during this period of time. Look, there is a global shortage on this at the moment and so we obviously need to be able to make sure that we can get these into the hands of people at a cost effective price.”

South Australians took 21097 tests in the latest reporting period.

The state’s Covid numbers were 2552 cases on Monday and 3246 on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Victoria broke its own daily record with 17,636 new cases reported on Wednesday, as well as 11 deaths.

NSW also broke its daily record for Covid-19 cases again on Wednesday, with 35,054 infections reported as well as eight deaths.