It is time Australian society stops pretending it is on top of this pandemic.......
ABC News, 28 July 2022:
NSW Health looked at data from 639,430 people infected with COVID for the first time in January when the Omicron wave took off.
The analysis was done by matching the name, and date of birth, of cases.
It showed that within five months, 20,460 people, or 3.2 per cent, had been reinfected.
Reinfection was defined as a positive test four weeks after being released from seven-day isolation, or 36 days after testing positive.
More than 20,000 people reinfected with COVID within five months
Number and proportion of the 639,403 cases in January reinfected in subsequent months
…..Nick Wood, a paediatrician and immunisation expert from the University of Sydney, said in theory, the first exposure to COVID should give some natural immunity that would stop people getting as sick the second time around.
"Your prior immunological exposure, natural infection and vaccine history all probably plays into how you as the individual deal with your second infection," he said.
People who were immune-suppressed or who had ongoing respiratory problems from the first infection would be more impacted with subsequent infections, he said.
"That's all the difficulties in teasing it out how severe, but I think the general, the belief is that the second or third infection are probably less severe than the initial primary infection."
Dr Wood said the BA.4 and BA.5 sub-variants of Omicron were able to evade both vaccine-induced immunity and infection from a previous variant.
"The immunity that they generate is not enough to stop you being infected," he said.
He said that over time, experts hope that as new variants come along, the population is more able to deal with them because of past infections or vaccination……
On the 24th of this month The Sydney Morning Herald reported that:
Researchers investigating long COVID cases in Australia say 5 per cent of people infected with COVID-19 will develop the condition. The prevalence of long COVID before vaccinations were available was an estimated 10 per cent.
“The 55,000 people in Australia who tested positive today ... equates to 2000 to 3000 new cases of long COVID,” Kovacic said. To date, Australia has recorded almost 9 million COVID-19 cases.
Even after accounting for reinfection “we’re looking at almost half a million people who are going to be suffering long-term symptoms in the coming months”, Kovacic said.
The Guardian newspaper reported on 27 July 2022 that a serosurvey of antibodies to the virus detected in blood donations, conducted at the Kirby Institute and the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS), had found that in 5,139 blood donations received from adults between 9 June and 18 June evidence of past COVID-19 infection was detected in 46.2% of samples. A previous examination of blood donors in late February 2022 had found evidence of past infection in only 17% of blood donors.
Noni Winkler, an author of the findings and an epidemiologist at the NCIRS, said the sample size was large enough to reflect rates of the virus in the broader adult population. It should be noted that seroprevalence estimates may miss approximately 20% of infections.
According to the federal Dept. of Health, as of Thursday 27 July 2022 there were est. 373,868 confirmed active COVID-19 cases across Australia. A total of 499,566 of these cases were newly confirmed within the previous 24 hours.
At that point 5,364 COVID-19 infected people were hospitalised, with 145 in intensive care units including 38 patients requiring ventilation.
The national daily COVID-19 death toll on 27 July was 126 people.
By 27 July the cumulative total of confirmed COVID-19 cases stood at 9,235,014 – a figure that can only be described as a massive under reporting of the actual number of infected individuals between 25 January 2020 to 27 July 2022.
The cumulative total of confirmed deaths due to COVID-19 for the same time period is 11,387 deaths of men, women & children. The federal Dept. of Health records that 14 of these deaths were in children 0 to 9 years of age and est. 8,843 were in people aged 70 to 90+ years of age.
Needless to say, the highest cumulative death tolls up to 27 July are in the east coast mainland states of Victoria (4,433), New South Wales (4,051) and Queensland (1,510).
NSW Dept. of Health as at 4pm on Wednesday. 27 July 2022:
In the December 2021 - January 2022 during a SARS-CoV-2 Omicron Variant surge period in New South Wales, when the public health response was visibly failing to meet even the most basic needs (information, testing & general support) of people expected to self-manage their COVID-19 infection at home, anecdotal evidence began to surface in Northern NSW that individuals and whole families were no longer reporting the result of RAT tests to NSW Health or seeking PCR testing where it was still available.
It was at that point that official government pandemic statistics in Australia were broken beyond repair as a predictive tool with regard to future pandemic behaviour and, effective federal-state public health strategies withered away in the face of continuously climbing infection and mortality figures in the most populous states.
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