Australia nears 12,000 Covid deaths with hospitals ‘heaving’ under caseload

Australia is getting closer to chalking up 12,000 Covid-related fatalities, as one in 12 public hospital beds across Australia is filled by someone with the virus.

The nation has recorded three straight days of 100-plus deaths related to the virus.

Another 27 have been reported nationally so far on Sunday – taking Australia’s total toll during the pandemic to 11,832 – along with almost 24,000 new cases.

The Victorian chief health officer, Prof Brett Sutton, estimates only half the actual number of infections are being picked up but says his state has probably hit its case peak, with numbers expected to flatten and fall in coming days.

While the number of Covid-infected people in Victorian hospitals fell by 69 on Sunday, Sutton had earlier warned hospitalisation figures were unlikely to plateau for another week or two.

“We have to think about everyone around us and our health system,” he said on Friday.

One in 12 public hospital beds across Australia is filled by a Covid-19 patient, despite fewer people ending up in intensive care than during previous waves of the virus.

Hospitals nationwide are “heaving” under the coronavirus caseload, with more than 5,000 beds occupied by positive patients, the federal health minister, Mark Butler, said.

“We’re numbering about 330,000 cases on a seven-day average per week at the moment, but we know from sampling from the positivity rates that we’re getting for PCR tests that the real number is probably at least twice that,” he told the Australian Medical Association national conference on Saturday.

“It is an extraordinary number of infections with this highly infectious new [Omicron] subvariant.”

Butler said the one upside of the current Omicron wave was that ICU rates were well below where they were in January, while the number of flu cases was also declining sharply.

But he added that the take-up of third vaccine doses had “stalled to quite an alarming extent”, with around 5 million people yet to receive a booster after their two initial shots.