Health: Australia’s worst-hit state says Covid-19 hospitalisations may plateau next week – Gulf Digital News

Health: Australia’s worst-hit state says Covid-19 hospitalisations may plateau next week – Gulf Digital News

Covid-19 hospitalisation rates in Australia's most populous state of New South Wales could plateau next week, a top health official said on Friday, as the state suffered record deaths from the virus for a third day.

Pressure on hospitals will likely remain for "the next few weeks", the state's health deputy secretary, Susan Pearce, said, though hospitalisation numbers were tracking better than the best-case scenario in an official modelling a week ago.

"That is pleasing, but that plateauing is obviously still at a relatively high level of Covid patients in our hospitals and in our (intensive care)," Pearce told a media briefing in Sydney, the state capital.

The surge in cases fuelled by the Omicron variant has piled pressure on hospitals, which are grappling with record admissions, and on other sectors of the economy.

With staff shortages beginning to disrupt supply chains, authorities have eased quarantine rules to allow thousands of close contacts of cases to return to work in the transport and freight industries if they are asymptomatic, an extension of exemptions that had earlier applied to food production staff.

But this has raised fears workers will be placed in riskier environments.

"Essential workers are being forced to put themselves in harm's way to