Australia’s three most populous states are facing shortfalls of more than 6,500 hospital and healthcare staff as the nation’s health system braces for Covid hospitalisations to rise to more than 5,000 cases a day.
This comes amid a turbulent start to the flu season that has also led to more than 1,300 admissions to a group of major hospitals across the nation so far this year.
On Tuesday the federal health minister, Mark Butler, said modelling suggested the peak of the current Covid wave was yet to come and it could take as long as six weeks until case numbers and hospitalisations fell.
Butler said hospitalisations, driven by the highly infectious Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants, could rise by 25% to just over 5,000 a day across Australia, similar to the January peak of almost 5,400, according to modelling based on data from the commonwealth and the states and territories.
Victoria’s Department of Health said 1,828 public hospital staff were currently furloughed due to Covid, out of its 100,000 strong workforce, while its New South Wales counterpart said 2,562 of its 122,000 staff were in isolation with Covid or awaiting a negative test result as of Monday.
The Queensland government has said more than 2,300 healthcare workers were currently off work due to Covid.
The Australasian College for Emergency Medicine’s president, Dr Clare Skinner, urged governments to consider mandating additional health measures recommended by public health officials to protect the community and ease pressure on hospitals.
This came after Victoria’s health minister, Mary-Anne Thomas, revealed on Tuesday that the state government rejected the advice from the state’s acting chief health officer to introduce mask mandates in settings such as early childhood, school and some retail environments.
Thomas said the government would instead empower individuals to make their own decisions.
The Victorian Department of Health advice suggested hospitalisations could rise to 200 admissions a day, but increased mask wearing could reduce those numbers to between 150 and 180 a day.
The president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association, Dr Roderick McRae, lashed the government, saying it had placed “great faith in the same people who are walking past signs saying wear a mask on this form of public transport and not wearing one”.
The Deakin University epidemiologist Prof Catherine Bennett said the focus should not be on mandates but on tweaking messaging, to ensure high-risk groups and those with repeat infections understood their risk.
“It’s not to say they’re really bad and we’ve got, you know, 10,000 cases. People don’t know what that means to them any more. I just think we need to present the data differently in a format that helps people measure their own risk,” Bennett told Guardian Australia.
“It’s not to scare them, it’s just to inform them that that’s actually what happens … if they have four infections, they’re infectious and four-times longer than the average person who’s still only had one.”
This week, the number of Covid cases in NSW hospitals surpassed 2,000 for the first time since February.
This followed 107 emergency department presentations for “influenza-like illness” recorded in NSW last week, according to the state’s latest respiratory surveillance report. NSW Health said this was down on 173 admissions recorded a week earlier, which suggested cases may have peaked.
“However, there could be subsequent peaks given the early start to the 2022 influenza season,” NSW Health said in the report, issued last week.
Queensland health authorities predicted Covid-related hospitalisations would exceed 1,000 in the coming weeks – surpassing the peak of 928 in January. It recorded 229 influenza hospitalisations last week – down from 307 the week before.
In Victoria, there were 737 Covid-related hospitalisations. The government does not publish hospitalisation data for influenza, although the state recorded an additional 3,466 influenza cases overall in the fortnight to 3 July – down from 8,601 in the previous two weeks.
Federal health department data collected from 15 sentinel hospitals around the nation showed there had been 1,323 influenza-related admissions since April – of which 6.5% were admitted directly to ICU. The data was compiled by the department using various sources and tracking systems, and may not represent an accurate reflection of influenza activity.
