Our deadliest day as Omicron nears peak

AUSTRALIA has experienced its deadliest Covid-19 day as most of the country nears the expected peak of the Omicron outbreak.

A total of 77 deaths were reported on Tuesday, although not all of them actually happened overnight.

NSW reported 36 deaths, Victoria had 22 and Queensland recorded 16.

There were also two deaths in South Australia and one in the ACT.

“This is the first time that the health system has come under pressure really to the extent that we’re seeing in the last week or two,” chief medical officer Paul Kelly said on Tuesday. “I said on the weekend, and I stand by those statements, that we are either at or close to the peak of this wave in certain states. Some states are lagging a bit further behind. We do know that peaks of the Covid-19 pandemic have a cadence to them.

“They go up, they get to a peak and then they go down – and that is happening. It will happen.”

Amid criticism of the federal government for its rollout of the vaccine in aged care facilities, Health Minister Greg Hunt said Australia had “one of the lowest rates of loss of life in aged care facilities in the world”.

Infectious diseases expert Sanjaya Senanayake, from the Australian National University, warns the next variant of concern could be just around the corner.

“In the same way that the world was so focused on Delta that Omicron’s emergence took us by surprise, similarly, we should be vigilant for another variant of concern that could surpass Omicron,” he said. “We always hoped that the next dominant variant of concern would be less virulent – just like Omicron – however, the reality is that we don’t see many viruses that evolve into something less deadly.

“We could have just been lucky with Omicron, and there is no guarantee that the next variant of concern won’t be more deadly and perhaps just as infectious.”

He said the likely sources of a new variant of concern were areas of the world where large populations were unvaccinated, or mutations within an animal, or even a single immunosuppressed person.

Rob Grenfell, from the CSIRO, agreed it was likely a new variant would emerge from countries with low immunisation rates and where the virus was able to circulate unabated.

“Even though a new variant of concern is likely to be more infectious and cause less severe disease, we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that a more deadly variant could develop,” he said.

“To prepare for the next variant of concern, we need to develop vaccines that have multiple targets on the virus.”