It took nearly three years, but we could well be witnessing COVID-19’s death rattle.
With more than 98% of people catching just a mild — or even asymptomatic — case of the virus, the current wave of infections could be its last hurrah as vaccines take hold. As expected, COVID has become as lethal as the flu with a case fatality rate of 0.1%.
Hospitalisations are high, but the overall percentage of cases requiring hospitalisation is low. Of the 341,204 active cases across the country, 5001 — or less than 1.4% — are in hospital. That’s a huge drop since August last year when about 10% of all COVID cases required hospitalisation.
With more than 95% of the eligible population double-vaccinated, and 70.9% triple-vaccinated, the shots are doing their job in limiting severe disease.
Of course, it’s not over yet. Hospitals are struggling with record high admissions because of Omicron variants coupled with influenza. NSW hospitals have capped the number of visitors allowed in wards, and in Victoria some elective surgery has been pushed back. And once again there is ambulance ramping and a staffing crisis as thousands of nurses and doctors isolate.
But infections are expected to peak next month and start going down. We’re back to rarely wearing masks except in hospitals and on public transport. The $750 disaster payment for casual workers infected with the virus who can’t get sick leave will be wound back at the end of September. RATs will no longer be free for concession card holders from the end of October. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is calling for the seven-day isolation period for those infected to be reduced to five.
The “new normal” will soon be very, very normal.
Naturally there are still concerns. Omicron subvariant BA.5 is causing reinfections in those who have recently recovered from similar variants, and there are concerns it could cause monthly reinfections.
The world will soon need to roll out second-generation vaccines — vaccines specifically designed for newer variants.
We don’t know the full ramifications of long COVID, especially among the reinfected. More than 10,000 Australians have died from the virus, most of them this year.
But for now there’s cause for careful celebration. COVID-19 has been reduced, for the most part, from a deadly, city-stopping, life-changing disease to an annoying, common virus. As the government cautiously said in July last year, it will be treated “just like the flu”.
Amber you have written recklessly and beyond your competence.
Recklessly because you are venturing public health opinion unsupported by a single epidemiological quote.
Beyond your competence because you have cherry-picked promising metrics and claimed that they are significant trends without acknowledging all the other factors that influence what happens next.
This is irresponsible and unprofessional journalism because it leans into a ‘living with Covid’ mythology that overlooks the genuine concerns epidemiologists have about long Covid, the potential damage to bodies from serial infections, the economic impacts of a viral strain that is more infectious than measles, and the high capacity for further, more lethal mutations arising from what is currently a huge global infection rate.
While greatly appreciating many of your articles that don’t require scientific knowledge I have also railed at times against the blithe journalism you post in gross scientific ignorance.
From a science analysis perspective this is literally the worst article I have ever seen you publish in these pages.
Hear, hear.
Rub, very, very well said, thank you.
Sorry Ruv.
You nailed this one, Ruv.
No mention in the article of future mutants nor of future vaccines, except in so far as the latter are ‘needed’. In that at least, she’s not wrong. But how plausible are Omicron-specific vaccines, and how far away are they?
Amber writes:
But infections are expected to peak next month and start going down. We’re back to rarely wearing masks except in hospitals and on public transport. The $750 disaster payment for casual workers infected with the virus who can’t get sick leave will be wound back at the end of September. RATs will no longer be free for concession card holders from the end of October. NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is calling for the seven-day isolation period for those infected to be reduced to five.
The likely very premature endings of things which the author mentions are presented as if great news, harbingers of wonderful times ahead. I think dog and tail, cause and effect, are being confused here, as those things are very likely to cause yet another wave rather than signifiy the ‘last hurrah’ of covid.
The Ukraine articles were fairly weird.
Rav, old sport I never thought that I would see the day but I agree with you totally. I wonder if Amber has ever heard of the Swedish ‘let it rip’ and the absolute disaster in lives lost that ‘experiment’ caused.
Perhaps Amber you are so cosseted away in your life circumstances that you have no comprehension of the fear that older Australians constantly live under from this mild flu.
Well over a hundred Australians a week are dying from COVID19. how many deaths do you want before you stop writing such drivel. At one point Australia led the world in rate of deaths and rate of cases, now that is something to cheer about Thank goodness as Scummo said it wasn’t a race – a race no-one particularly want’s to win.
And the worst of it is that there are so many selfish self-servers prepared to ignore what few restrictions there currently are that this sort of trash talk will simply give them their OK to keep thumbing their nose at them.
Oh well so long as you and your kind are able to take measures to avoid infection all is right Jack.
Lionheart, if you look at the final scores with Sweden,they didn’t do all that badly, that is a shaky base to justify your villifications etc. imho.
The scores for Sweden in total don’t look too bad, with a population of 10,350,000 the death toll is 19,216, as ever the devil is in the detail. During the “personal Responsibility experiment there were near 10,000 deaths.
After vaccinations and social distancing were introduced by the usually silent King, the death rate dropped remarkably..
Ruv, I assume you mean by the science that the research done by the Kirby Institute in Sydney, and reported by the ABC, that the new Omicron was totally unaffected by any major vaccination, and had been observed in South Africa to be relatively a mild infection?
Or are you calling science the claim that because Omicron is highly contagious it must be worse in every respect and that the reason folk had mild infections was because of the vaccinations, even though the vaccinations don’t work on Omicron, and even that the newer variants were less affected by vaccinations, – how can they be less affected than nothing?
Or how four booster shots of a vaccination that doesn’t have any effect on the Omicron virus will somehow still reduce it.?
There is what is the general publications by various public departments, on one side, and extremist anti vax on another, I would not fault Amber in a publication where the “norm” has to not be directly challenged yet has lost it’s way.
Yes use science, but all of it, not just the bits you find convenient,
Geoff wrote: I assume you mean by the science that the research done by the Kirby Institute in Sydney
Geoff I didn’t say anything about vaccine efficacy: you appear to be straw-manning to put your oar in on a different topic. If you want to engage my interest, please talk about either what Amber wrote, or what I did.
Regardless, if your interest is in vaccine efficacy on emerging strains, there are reputable international sources from which Australian epidemiological institutes like Kirby, Burnett and others also draw for their modelling.
You should read them.
All of the epidemiology centres in Australia said “Omicron is a “Comparatively” mild disease, vaccine evasive, with a warning of hospital stresses due to high case numbers.
None of them were not supportive of the “Let it RIP” strategy.
“Comparatively mild” referred to Delta.
Omicron has killed 140% more people that Delta in Australia so far.
Omicron is about as virulent as the initial Wuhan strain, more contagious and vaccine evasive.
A friend of mine said “Aren’t these variants going to get less virulent? and all I could say was “That was someone’s assumption”
We all know what an assumption does?
It makes an ass out of you and me.
Amber should stick to writing about what she knows rather than rehashing the residual PR rubbish being generated out of the “Firm”..
Given the double negative and plural verb (‘none‘ takes the singular) in “None of them were not supportive of the “Let it RIP” strategy.” did you mean “All were supportive of …”?
Each COVID wave has been more transmissible than the one before – hardly surprising given the most transmissible strain is likely to become dominant. The percentage of those infected or dying is lower with Omicron, but absolute numbers are much higher.
Once this wave is over – unless the vaccines improve or the population begins community mitigation measures such as mask-wearing – I expect there will be repeated waves of COVID, each more transmissible than the last. The virus has mutated quickly, allowing for repeated infections much more frequently than influenza.
If case numbers are declining, it’s nothing more than a dead cat bounce until the next wave arrives. And providing the community false hope it’s nearly over is reckless at best.
Sorry Amber, but this is the sort of toilet paper grade reporting we can get from right-wing media, for free. If this is what Crikey are dishing up, I want my money back.
Peter wrote: The virus has mutated quickly, allowing for repeated infections much more frequently than influenza.
Yes. Influenza spends some of its time in animals, which helps it produce mutations we’re not used to. Although Covid-19 is crossing the zoonotic boundary, it’s so new to humans that it’s still mutating quite freely within us, and it’s not yet clear that zoonotic mutations are playing much of a role yet (though I bet they will over time.)
Genetic studies show that in human infections, the base mutation rate is about one mutation per case-week, which is pretty much one mutation per active infection in people with low severity, maybe six mutations in the seriously ill, and dozens in people who are immunocompromised and can’t shake it — who may also be a key source of recombinant mutations: the sort that could suddenly get both very transmissible and very dangerous.
Not all mutations are beneficial or even significant, but we are actively putting pressure on replication through vaccines, social measures and our own growing resistance, so the mutations selected for will tend to be quite impressive until Covid-19 runs out of easy tricks — and in a coronavirus we’re already not great at sustaining resistance.
Significantly, confirmed world case-rates peaked at around 24M this year, in just one week of January. We can guess the real case-rates at multiples of that: sixty to a hundred million chances of beneficial mutations in just one week, and hence very little chance of detecting it before it transmits internationally since borders are now open and genomic analyses will be overwhelmed.
This week it’s 6.7 million cases that we know of: many multiples of back in mid-2020 when we had no vaccines, and growing again. It hasn’t fallen below 2.54 million since 2021.
This information is easy to find and not hard to interpret. It needs only some diligence with the data, and grade-school math.
However, Amber seems not to respect science or scientific method, evidences no clue about what testing an hypothesis looks like, is blind to the fact that the chief job of evidence is to disprove what we think is true and test the fragility of our ideas, doesn’t seem to care for data except to prop up her own beliefs, shows no respect for the humungous weight of intellectual wattage being thrown at this issue, seems oblivious to the fact that a global pandemic is a volatile global health emergency, and seems unwilling to learn from her errors.
There is nothing wrong with being wrong if we learn from it and minimise the harm, but when does professional duty of care to her readership cut in, and require her to start acknowledging what she doesn’t know?
Frustratingly, there are good news stories to report if only she knew them. For example, the UN thinks Covid will have no long-term effect on world population (i.e. we are handling it, however painfully), and in 2021, first-gen vaxes saved about 1.7 times as many lives as we lost to Covid (some 20 million saved.)
Amber’s behaviour is a classic example of ignorance!
She doesn’t understand that she really doesn’t have a clue, merely an opinion.
Everyone is entitled to an opinion as long it is stated as one, rather tham misrepresented as the current scientific findings or facts.
The issue here isn’t forming an opinion, ratty: it’s the professional responsibility attached to accepting remuneration for health guidance.
Define a statement as constructive when, if true, it would change our actions.
Amber’s article is both ignorant and unconstructive. In the best case, there’s no action attached; in the worst case it encourages misguided actions.
This article therefore serves exactly one party and that is not Amber’s readers.
It is the last Hurrah – not for Covid – but for the elderly dying like swatted flies and not being noticed in the news.
As usual not important for the journalists
As long as people can go out and go overseas, it’s all good, no worries mate. Never mind the dead.
Appalling piece of ill-informed, irresponsible cheerleading from Crikey.
Must be something wrong with us in north Qld, – lots of old people up here, but very few dying of Omicron.
Or perhaps it is more the Old age homes that are the problem, – why is it that you see very few indigenous folk in old people homes? because they look after their relatives at home despite the inconvenience.
Oh, what would I know? – only dozens of fellow old folk none of whom have died from Omicron, – also interestingly, very few of us are vaccinated, perhaps it is vaccination, plus Omicron plus a major life threatening ‘complication’ and being trapped in a meaningless old folk’s home existence.
I suspect that you will find that most who die had very little reason to live.
Don’t dribble on!
I come from FNQ and at one stage, we had both Cairns and Townsville Hospitals on By Pass courtesy of FIFO workers from PNG.
Flights were cancelled until the vaccinations caught up with them and then the rest were returned home very sick.
Social distancing is the normal personal space practice and all I can say is that those without vaccinations are last on the priority list for an ICU bed.
“Stupid is as stupid does!”
Floating petrie dishes, whoo hoo!
I agree with Ruv’s comments. With 4,000 patients in hospital in Australia and climbing (that is equivalent to 8 medium to large hospitals just treating Covid), and thousands at home off sick, we have a long way to go. Long Covid will be with us for a long time. Higher rates of sudden death, heart attack, stroke and longterm lung problems have all been shown in the US and UK studies, and are going to be major and ongoing.
The virus has become far more infectious (measles like) and is not going to disappear however we much we wish so, and is continuing to mutate rapidly because we allow it to spread and proliferate in large numbers. Like influenza where a bad variant crops up every decade or so, it is only time till a much worse Covid mutant appears and our response is likely to be dismissive. I am a surgeon, but when I mention Covid boosters to elderly patients with heart and lung problems, many tell me that they will not get them, so that immunization protection is likely to wane quickly.
Further late effects are still unknown – will the brain effects (shown on CT scans) lead to earlier dementia and premature dementia problems in many people still in their 30s and 40s who had a “mild infection” ? Is there any oncogenic (cancer causing) effect ? We will not know for 20 years, but we have exposed almost all of Western populations to a new virus for which we have no understanding of the longterm effects. Researchers are already finding that in some people the virus does not disappear but either the virus or part of its genome remain detectable, in the gut and in the brain cells, as a possible latent virus. The Chinese by protecting their populations may yet have the last laugh.
Indeed Andrew.
Meanwhile, the ABC reports that Covid is tracking to become the leading cause of death in Australia this year. [https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-19/qld-covid19-modelling-death-rate-to-surpass-heart-disease/101249576] At the same time, confirmed global infection rates are ten times what they were in July 2020 when the world still had no vaccines — and they’re rising at a time when much of the world has been dismantling test regimes.
Missing from this article was any sign of scientific understanding, diligent research or sufficient journalistic responsibility. One of my staff said he thought it’s really about the selfish emotional relief that some people feel about no longer fearing an infection or further government restrictions.
Whether that’s so or not, Amber certainly seems to have confused validating her own personal feelings with having the intellectual authority to issue public health guidance.
Ruv, You seem to have a aired alot of unsupported assertions, that is not the scientific method, but you have finished up with a speculation that because some hearsay about people who are glad that Covid has eased significantly, that then becomes incontrovertible fact from which you base further unproven assertions.
If we strip away all of your unproven assertions, what is left is an occasional cherry picked statistic leading to yet further unsupported assertions, all proving only to justify attacking someone who says things you may disagree with.
No rigor, all you say is fairy dust, or worse, you may as well be a follower of David Hume the ‘philosopher’.
Sorry Geoff you are dribbling again.
The psychology of removing mask mandates was to allow the medical fraternity (us) to help cull the stupid once they end up in hospital.
The population’s resistance to re implementing them, makes it easier for us: Not Vaccinated, lowest priority for ICU bed.
The “airheads” and “cookers” will help make up the dead and really no great loss.
Nah, this is not the last hurrah of COVID-19, no matter how much you want it to be. Here in Perth we have our highest number of people in hospital with COVID.
Disappointing article.