(Image: Private Media)

COVID-19 cases are expected to double in the next four to six weeks as a new, more transmissible version of the Omicron strain spreads across Australia. 

Although there’s no evidence yet that it causes more severe illness, BA.2 is about 25% to 30% more transmissible, a key concern with many Queensland and NSW residents displaced and homeless after the devastating floods. 

Healthcare workers say the system has been under enormous pressure for months, with staff shortages and an increasing number of people seeking treatment for injuries, and COVID infections escalating concerns. 

Increase in infections, gastro and in-hospital care

At the end of February, the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital went under water. Ballina Hospital was evacuated shortly afterwards.

Australasian College for Emergency Medicine president Dr Clare Skinner tells Crikey this put an “enormous strain” on emergency departments as patients who required oxygen or refrigerated medication were transferred to other hospitals. 

“Acute hospital overcrowding is worse than usual at the moment because there are a lot of displaced people who require care,” she said, adding that displaced people with disabilities or those who generally receive at-home care now had to be treated in hospitals. 

“Our system runs incredibly lean at the best of times, and any degree of stress makes it even more dysfunctional than it is on a good day,” she said.

More than 1200 people in the northern rivers area are in emergency accommodation, with more than 2000 homes and businesses declared uninhabitable. The floods have been declared a national emergency. 

Skinner says there is also an increase in people with infections from the floodwaters turning up at hospitals. 

“Floodwater can make things get infected very easily, and there are also people with gastroenteritis which is often from contamination of food and drinking water and by eating food that hasn’t been fully refrigerated during power outages,” she said.

She urges people with wounds that have been exposed to floodwater to take their injury seriously, and seek care early to avoid needed high-level hospital management. 

Bad time for a new strain

General secretary of the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association Brett Holmes says “hundreds” of nurses had been affected by the floods, but so far not a huge number had sought flood support. 

“We’ve got a major issue around staffing levels … with people who have become homeless,” he said. 

While accommodation assistance was important, he says more nurses were needed in flood-affected areas — although getting nurses to a region with limited accommodation was a major problem. 

“As we face another spike in COVID-19 cases, that will mean even outside of the disaster of the floods there’s no easy, quick fix here,” he said.  

This morning NSW recorded more than 14,000 new daily cases, and total weekly cases have surged by more than 20,000 since last week, almost 1000 of whom were admitted to hospital. Queensland recorded 4500 new daily cases, 252 of whom are in hospital.  

Holmes says the government had yet to respond to the association’s request to increase patient ratios, increase COVID allowances and remove the wages cap imposed in 2020.

A problem made worse by the climate emergency

Holmes and Skinner stress that the pandemic had exposed the problems of running a lean healthcare system with limited staffing numbers to cut costs, but that not enough had been done across the three years to address concerns. 

“The floods have come on top of rising COVID-19 numbers across both states, and that’s just putting extraordinary amounts of pressure on the system as a whole,” Skinner said. 

“The pandemic is not a short-term disaster and unfortunately we predict that we’re going to have increasing numbers of climate events like the ones we’re experiencing at the moment. The pandemic is a climate event and the floods are a climate event.”

Skinner says that despite the huge pressures, staff were doing their best to provide care, working around the clock to ensure patients were well looked after.