A leading infectious disease expert has questioned why Queensland has stopped releasing the vaccination status of Covid fatalities, as the state struggles to convince residents to get booster shots, despite record hospitalisations from the virus.
Queensland has the lowest rate of Covid booster shots in the country, with less than half the state having received a third dose.
The director of infectious diseases at Mater Health Services, associate prof Paul Griffin, said compiling and releasing vaccination information could help stave off the worst of an outbreak fuelled by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron subvariants, against which the first two jabs provide little protection.
“We need to demonstrate to people all the things we’ve been saying in terms of vaccines working really well at protecting against severe disease, hospitalisation and death,” he said.
Having “real data in our population” that backed up the talk has the potential to be “very powerful”, he said.
“I would hope that that data is still being collected,” Griffin says. “I don’t have any evidence that is the case, and we certainly haven’t been hearing that but, I think, the more data we have the better.”
Authorities in other states are releasing that data. New South Wales health department’s Covid report for the week ending 9 July, for example, reported 95 Covid deaths.
“Of these, 95 were eligible for a third dose of a Covid-19 vaccine but only 62 (65%) had received three or more doses,” the report reads.
It also came as data provided to the ABC by Victoria’s health department demonstrated the effectiveness of vaccines in saving lives, with one-third of Victorians who died with Covid-19 in the first half of the year being unvaccinated. That was despite the unvaccinated cohort making up just 4% of the state’s over-12 population. Seventy-two per cent of people to have died had not received a third shot.
Queensland was releasing the vaccination status of Covid deaths earlier in the year.
On 22 January, for example, 10 Queenslanders were reported dead from Covid. Of them, three were unvaccinated, seven were double-vaccinated and none were triple vaccinated.
But that is information that “requires manpower” to gather, Lara Herrero an associate professor of virology and infectious disease at Griffith University says.
People may die at home or in aged care from Covid, their vaccination status might not be known and someone needs to ask and then record that information.
“And as you and everyone knows, we’re so incredibly short staffed,” Herrero says.
“Yes, absolutely, that data is critically important. But having enough manpower to support our hospital systems is also critically important. So it’s a tricky situation.”
The health department responded to questions from Guardian Australia by saying that data on the vaccination status of Queenslanders hospitalised and dying with Covid was still being collected “for internal purposes and to support our operational response” to the pandemic.
It did not answer repeated questions as to why it was not being released to the public.
On Wednesday, 1034 Queenslanders were in hospital with Covid in a wave of infections that continues to surge above the previous peak when, on 25 January, 928 were in hospital.
The state’s third vaccination rate continues to lag behind every state and territory with 64% of Queenslanders aged 16+ boosted, well behind Western Australia, which leads the country at 82.9%.
The state government has been forced to answer questions this week after criticisms of the amount it has spent on campaigns to encourage vaccination.
But Herrero said any public information campaign aimed at driving up vaccination rates needs to take into account the fact that people are exhausted after “two years of being bombarded”.
“This is not your average population, this is a tired population,” Herrero says.
“So our messages need to adapt and need to recognise that people are tired. It’s not good enough just to do another public health campaign – we need to do a public health campaign that’s targeted to an exhausted population.”
