New milder Covid-19 strain is sweeping the community
Health authorities in New South Wales say the state is in the midst of it's biggest Covid wave in a year. More than a thousand people are turning up to emergency departments each week though the number requiring treatment is far lower.
Transcript
00:00 Health officials in New South Wales say the spike in cases comes off the back of a traditionally
00:06 social end of year period.
00:09 In December, we were already seeing a rise in COVID cases with activity around then noted
00:15 as high across the state.
00:17 Also driving the surge is a new Omicron sub-variant.
00:22 Now this is to be expected of COVID.
00:24 We know that it's an unstable virus, it mutates on a regular basis and that's how it continues
00:31 to infect people around the world.
00:34 Practice those good public health measures that we learned during the COVID period such
00:39 as, in addition to stay at home, getting vaccinated against COVID.
00:46 And that's particularly important for people at high risk because they're of older age
00:51 or because they've got underlying health conditions.
00:55 Each week, hospitals across the state say they're seeing around 1,400 people arrive
01:01 with COVID and of those, around 400 then go on to require treatment.
01:07 There is some good news though.
01:08 While this particular strain does appear to be more infectious, it does not appear to
01:14 cause a more severe disease.
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