NSW braces for horror Covid-19 month

NSW faces a horror fortnight of more than 1000 new Covid cases a day expected, with hospital admissions likely to peak in October.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian in Sydney on Friday. Picture: Dylan Coker

NSW faces a horror fortnight of more than 1000 new Covid cases a day expected, with hospital admissions likely to peak in October, but Premier Gladys Berejiklian says she is confident the state’s health system will cope.

On Friday, NSW recorded 12 deaths, the highest daily number since the beginning of the current outbreak, with 1431 new community infections.  

One of the deaths was a woman in her 30s who had not been vaccinated. Sydney mother of four Jamila Yaghi, 38, died at home just one day after testing positive for Covid-19, prompting a plea from the Premier. “Without giving away anybody’s private circumstances, some people who are very sick aren’t getting a test until right at the last minute,” Ms Berejiklian said. “The job of our contact tracers is made easier if people get tested as soon as they think they may have been exposed.”

NSW normally had between 500 and 600 ICU beds available, she said, but had tripled that number, including staff, and quadrupled the number of ventilators.

“The next fortnight is likely to be our worst in terms of the number of cases, but it is not the number of cases we need to be focusing on but how many of those cases end up in our intensive care wards and hospitals and how many people we have vaccinated,” she said.

The highest number of cases was likely to occur in the next fortnight, the Premier said, because after that time the number of vaccinations would kick in and case numbers would go down. However, there would be a lag in the number of people who would then need hospitalisation, as ­serious illness tends to develop in the second week of infection.

“So given where the case numbers are and given that lag in time, we are anticipating October to be the worst month for our hospital system,” Ms Berejiklian said.

Epidemiologist Adrian Esterman said the effective reproduction number (Reff) for NSW’s Covid-19 outbreak had dipped slightly to where it now sits at 1.1, in a hopeful sign that infections were slowing. But he cautioned cases would hit 2000 by Friday September 7, and 3000 by the following Friday, September 17. 

“It is a reason to be hopeful. The thing is that the whole idea of all of these restrictions and public health measures and vaccination is to get the Reff below one,” Professor Esterman said.

“The Reff says if you’re infected, how many people did you infect? So if you have a Reff of two you infect two others on average.” 

Professor Esterman said he believed the slight dip in the reproduction rate reflected the high uptake of the Covid-19 vaccine in the community, after NSW surpassed 70 per cent first-dose jabs this week. 

Ms Berejiklian restated her commitment to releasing plans showing how health officials and specialists are preparing for a rise in hospital Covid-19 admissions during September and October.

“I want to make it very clear that every day there are models that are presented from the experts we have in NSW, but also ­externally from non-government organisations. And nobody is going to get the exact figure right, no one is going to get the exact day right, but I have been very open with the information.”

The Premier noted a shift in attitude by other state and territory leaders as they too went through the same “difficult” transition to living with the virus, rather than trying to eliminate it.

Victorian Premier Dan Andrews has conceded the state’s public health strategy was now to suppress new infections while increasing vaccination rates.

Ms Berejiklian denied contact tracers had lost control in NSW, saying once the state hit the 70 per cent double dose milestone, health authorities would begin a “systems transition” changing its approach to contact tracing.