WA breaks new daily Covid-19 case record on Friday

Western Australia has recorded a grim Covid-19 milestone as hospitalisations continue to surge.

Western Australia has recorded more than 1000 new Covid-19 cases in one day for the first time since the pandemic began about two years ago.

According to chief health officer Andy Robertson, there were 1043 new cases reported on Friday.

Hospitalisations increased from seven to 12 people but none of them are in intensive care.

Of Friday’s total number of new infections, more than 800 are locally acquired, while some are still under investigation.

It was a large jump from the 617 new cases reported on Thursday. There were 645 recorded on Wednesday and just 252 on Tuesday.

It was only yesterday Premier Mark McGowan said seeing 1000 new cases per day was “to be expected” and wasn’t “a cause for panic”.

Western Australia recorded more than 1000 new cases on Friday, setting a new record. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Philip Gostelow

Dr Robertson told ABC Radio the numbers were in line with recent modelling and expected to see the number of hospitalisations increase in the coming weeks.

He said it was likely there were more undetected cases within the community and those people weren't getting tested.

“There is quite a lot of asymptomatic disease out there, particularly in younger groups who may be triple vaccinated,” Dr Robertson said.

“They may have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.

“We‘re probably not capturing everyone.”

Last week the Premier said keeping state borders closed until March 3 could ‘save hundreds of lives’ but the chief health officer said it was hard to tell if that was true. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Tony McDonough

Last week Mr McGowan announced the state border would reopen on March 3 – four weeks after its initial open date – and said the move would “save hundreds of lives”.

However, Dr Robertson said it would be “very hard” to tell if that was true in the short term.

“Within the first four days, when we went to the compassionate (travel rules), we got 20,000 people come in and we got over around 230 cases,” he said.

“So if we’d had those 230 cases, even assuming some of them had been picked up before they got into the community, we would have had a lot more cases in the community. That would have led for this outbreak to have got going a lot faster.

“That will have an impact on hospitalisations and ultimately ICU and potentially deaths.

“But to do the final modelling, we probably won’t be able to do it until the end of the actual outbreak.”