Aged care warned of looming fifth Covid wave

An epidemiologist has warned the aged care sector to stay vigilant of soaring Covid-19 cases as Australia heads into a fifth wave this winter.

Between the 11th and the 18th of May, there number of Covid infections in residential aged care rose by 18 per cent from 2,654 to 3,132 cases.

As of last week, there were 453 reported outbreaks in facilities across Australia.

Infections are forecast to double in the next fortnight.

University of South Australia Professor Adrian Esterman attributed the rise of Covid cases to the cold weather and said there were 'obvious signs' a new wave is coming.

"It's a triple whammy," he told the ABC.

"It's clear that we're going into a fifth Omicron wave across the country.

"We've seen numbers going up for three weeks in a row."

It comes as health authorities are also reporting an increase in cases of influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

Flu cases are 100 times higher than last year, with over 40,000 laboratory-proven reports since the start of 2023.

More than 8,000 cases were diagnosed in the first half of May alone, according to the national diseases surveillance system.

NSW reported the most cases of Covid in the last seven days, with 2,095 people diagnosed – an 18 per cent increase on the previous week.

But relaxed mandatory testing and isolation rules are likely to underrepresent the actual number of Covid cases in the community.

Professor Esterman said the looming fifth wave would likely arrive in an entirely different landscape than before.

Approximately 218,000 doses of Covid vaccines have been administered over the last seven days, adding to the more than 2,5 million adults who have received a booster dose since January.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared that Covid no longer represented a 'global health emergency.'

According to WHO data, the global virus death rate dropped to just over 3,500 a week in April after a peak of more than 100,000 people per week in January 2021.

The virus is estimated to have caused almost 7 million deaths globally.

The warning of a fifth Covid wave comes just after a detailed report handed down by US Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Marco Rubio on the virus's origins.

"Covid likely leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology after a bio-containment accident in the second half of 2019," Mr Rubio told Sky News host Sharri Markson.

Ms Markson said Mr Rubio's report drew on the investigative work done over two years for her book, 'What Really Happened in Wuhan', and a Sky News documentary.

Mr Rubio said it was likely that a Chinese military virologist, Zhou Yusen, invented the first vaccine for Covid in February 2020 - only 35 days after China publicly admitted the virus was infectious.

"It also includes the fact that Zhou Yusen died sometime in late May or early June 2020 under unusual and mysterious circumstances."

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