Australian state warns COVID-19 hospitalisations to peak in October
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[August 30, 2021]
By Colin Packham and Jonathan Barrett
CANBERRA (Reuters) -Intensive care cases in
Australia's New South Wales will hit a peak in October as COVID-19
infections accumulate, said the premier of the country's most populous
state, which reported record daily new infections on Monday.
New South Wales, the epicentre of Australia's current outbreak, declared
a record 1,290 new cases as the nation struggles to contain the highly
contagious Delta variant.
Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the state was preparing for additional
hospitalisations as infections pile up, before increased vaccination
coverage starts to ease the pressure. "We anticipate that the worst
month, the worst time for our intensive care unit will be in October,"
Berejiklian said in the state capital Sydney. "We will need to manage
things differently because we are in the middle of a pandemic, but we
will cope." There are 840 people in hospital for COVID-19 in New South
Wales, with 137 in intensive care and 48 requiring ventilation. The
state reported four additional fatalities on Monday, taking the COVID-19
death toll to 1,003 in Australia, the last of the Group of 20 big
economies to exceed that milestone.

One of the four was the first known death of an Aboriginal person. The
50-year-old man, who was not vaccinated, lived in western NSW where
vaccination rates are particularly low, raising fears there will be many
more deaths there.
"Aboriginal people were deemed to be vulnerable communities, vulnerable
groups in the vaccine rollout. And clearly that has failed," Linda
Burney, Labour's Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, told
reporters.
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A lone woman, wearing a protective face mask, walks across an
unusually quiet city centre bridge on the first day of a lockdown as
the state of Victoria looks to curb the spread of a coronavirus
disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Melbourne, Australia, July 16, 2021.
REUTERS/Sandra Sanders/File Photo

Nationwide, a record 1,375 new COVID-19 cases were
reported. Australia has used a system of strict lockdowns and
quarantine to keep coronavirus infection and death rates lower than
in most comparable nations, however the Delta variant is now
pressuring health services. Just over 33% of those aged 16 and older
have received two vaccine doses, well below most comparable nations,
according to government data. The delays were partly because of
changed health advice over the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, which
was to be the backbone of the country's immunisation programme,
after rare cases of blood clots among some recipients. The pace of
vaccination in Australia has since risen to a seven-day average of
more than 250,000 doses a day, the fastest rate ever, according to a
Reuters analysis.
Australia's second-most populous state, Victoria, reported 73 new
COVID-19 cases on Monday, a day after Premier Dan Andrews said he
would extend lockdown measures as daily infections reached the
highest in a year.
(Reporting by Colin Packham in Canberra, additonal reporting by
Wayne Cole and Sonali Paul; Editing by Jane Wardell, Christian
Schmollinger and Himani Sarkar)
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