Australia Covid News, Australia Covid Case, Australia Omicron case, People scramble to get tested as Australia records an increase in Omicron cases

Covid in Australia: Australia reported a daily record number of nearly 50,000 Covid-19 cases on Tuesday

Sydney:

Australia reported a record daily count of nearly 50,000 Covid-19 cases on Tuesday as the Omicron variant ran through the population and sent people in for testing.

While the Omicron surge has clearly left behind relatively few fatal diseases, it has fueled a rush into increasingly scarce self-administered rapid antigen kits and created hour-long queues at centers offer more reliable PCR tests.

Australia has been successful in containing the spread of much of the pandemic through border closures and active testing and tracing.

But an earlier wave fueled by the Delta variant snuffed out zero-Covid ambitions in much of the country, including the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne.

Today, like many countries, the country relies on vaccines for protection with 91.5% of the population over 16 years of age fully immunized. About 2.5 million people have received booster injections.

Deputy chief medical officer Sonya Bennett said Australia had recorded 47,738 infections in the past 24 hours, up from around 38,000 the day before, when the Omicron variant was kept in place.

She said blocked fallopian tubes cases being treated in hospitals across the country nearly doubled in a week to 2,362 infections.

But the number in intensive care is much smaller: 184. And of those, 59 are on ventilators – unchanged from a week ago.

“Speaking of those significant case numbers, they keep going up. Those are big numbers we’ve never seen before in Australia,” Bennett said.

“I think at this point we all know someone who has had Covid, or we’ve put a colleague off work because they’re quarantined or isolated, or we’ve had events and impacts canceled. other in our daily lives.”

Early evidence indicates that most Covid patients in intensive care have been infected with the Delta variant, and a significant proportion are not fully vaccinated or are suffering from other illnesses, she said.

Despite soaring infection rates, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has rejected calls for free rapid antigen tests.

Morrison said on Monday: “We’re in another phase of this pandemic where we just can’t go around and make everything free.

“We have to live with this virus.”

(Except for the title, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from an aggregated feed.)