Death rates are up compared with earlier in the year.

COVID infections have come in waves during the pandemic. First, we were hit with the alpha variant, then delta and now omicron.

But this year has seen wave after wave of omicron variants that almost “collide into one another”, says epidemiologist Professor Michael Toole AM ahead of his COVID Update lecture on 16 August.

“The daily number of cases haven’t gone below 22,000 this year,” he says. “So, we could see that cases go down, but then they go up again. I think it’s because omicron is mutating much more rapidly than any of the other variants like delta.”

“We’ve really had four peaks this year, already. There was one in January, and another one in March and another one in May, and then another one in July.

“And the space between each wave is getting shorter and shorter. So, it’s almost irrelevant to say we’re past the peak. We’re just in a stage where the number of cases is going down. That’s all you can say.”

The rate of hospitalisations and deaths are higher now than at any point this year in Australia, although the trend is now downwards.
 

“I think it all comes down to vaccination,” says Professor Toole. “In January, we had a very high proportion of the population that had two doses, and at that time, two doses were pretty protective.

“But our third dose booster rate is quite low. It’s been stuck on around 70% since April and it’s not showing any sign of increasing.

“That puts Australia at number 35 in the world. So, we are way up when it comes to two doses, but two doses of vaccine are of now irrelevant. On three doses, we are way down.”

Australians are now dying from COVID at a much higher rate than other high-income nations with comparable health systems, including South Korea, Japan and Germany, says Professor Toole.

“Globally, we rank number two in the world for deaths per million during the last seven days,” he says. “And we rank number five for cases per million population. So, we’re very high.”

Over the last week, deaths from COVID in Australia (per million) were eight times higher than South Korea and four times higher than Japan.

“It’s hard to figure out why,” says Professor Toole. “But, of those five countries, Australia has the lowest third-dose booster rate so that might be explaining why Australia is getting so many more severe cases and deaths.

“Masks are very common in South Korea and Japan and yet they’ve still got the highest case rates in the world. While masks protect against infection they’re not as relevant to deaths. So, I still think it’s the boosters in those two countries (South Korea and Japan) that are keeping hospitalisations down. And maybe their health systems aren’t under as much stress.” 

Boosters protect against death from COVID. In Victoria, for instance, only 3% of deaths were in people who had received four doses of the COVID vaccine.

By contrast, 37% of COVID deaths in Victoria occurred in people who had not had a single dose of the vaccine (those people make up only 5% of the Victorian population).

Professor Toole is a retired epidemiologist, and the Associate Principal Research Fellow at Burnet Institute.

Professor Toole will be providing a COVID Update at the upcoming Healthed webcast on 16 August – register here.