Confirmed cases passed 40,000 in a week for the first time since January.
Covid cases are on the climb again with the most cases in a week recorded since the end of the summer wave, according to covidlive.com.au.
For the seven days ending Friday 26 May, Australia recorded 40,047 new cases – the most recorded since the week ending 13 January (42,823). Numbers have climbed in each of the past 4 weeks.
In the past week 184 Australians died from covid, the most in seven days since 17 February (195).
For the period of 1 January 2022 to 22 May 2023, covid was recorded as the cause of death in 5.3% of all deaths in permanent residents in aged care facilities. Since the beginning of the Omicron outbreak in mid December 2021, there have been 88,699 deaths in residential aged care from all causes (report period from 15 December 2021 to 22 May 2023). Covid deaths account for 5.2% of this figure.
New South Wales recorded the most deaths for the week with 69, followed by 59 in Victoria, and 30 in WA. NSW had 14,409 new cases, Victoria 10,642 and Queensland 5,299.
Australia has now had a total of 11,585,286 confirmed cases of covid, with 20,879 deaths.
Meanwhile the AIHW has today released new hospitalisation data showing the covid pandemic continues to have an impact.
“There were 11.6 million public and private hospital admissions in 2021-22, a 2.1% decrease from the previous year. This followed a 6.3% increase from 2019-20 to 2020-21 and a 2.8% decrease from 2018-19 to 2019-20,” the latest MyHospitals update reports.
The report also contains information on the number of hospitalisations involving a covid diagnosis, showing a significant increase from 4700 in 2020-21 to 263,400 in 2021-22.
“While there has been a substantial increase in the number of hospitalisations involving a covid diagnosis, this does not necessarily reflect the severity of the illness; it could be related to the widespread nature of covid. In many cases patients are admitted with covid, not necessarily because of covid,” said AIHW spokesman Dr Andrew Webster.
Of the 263,400 hospitalisations involving a covid diagnosis, 3% involved a stay in the intensive care unit (ICU), 1.3% required ventilation and 2% of patients died in hospital.
Around 1 in 5 (19%) of the hospitalisations involving a covid-19 diagnosis recorded one comorbid chronic condition and 9.3% recorded 2 or more.
“The most common comorbid chronic conditions were type 2 diabetes (12%) and cardiovascular disease (11.6%),” said Dr Webster.
