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.
