Canberra hospitals could be treating "a few dozen" COVID-19 patients by the end of the week, as the ACT health system readies itself for the highest caseload it has managed since the pandemic began.
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There were 11 people in hospital in the territory being treated for COVID-19 at 8pm on Sunday night, including two people in intensive care; one person was receiving ventilation support. It is the highest number of COVID-19 patients in hospital since October 27.
Health authorities are relying on weekly modelling to determine the potential impact to hospitals of the rapid escalation of COVID-19 cases in the ACT as widespread community transmission takes hold.
Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith said the hospitals were preparing for the worst-case scenario, but so far the worst predictions had not eventuated.
"The team is working on the basis of a worst-case scenario of seeing a few dozen people potentially in hospital by late this week, early next week. So they're doing the planning around what that might look like," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
"We know that's not entirely unrealistic, but we're also hoping our very high vaccination rates here in the ACT will keep those numbers of people needing to be hospitalised - and particularly that number of people needing intensive care - as low as possible."
Ms Stephen-Smith said health authorities had expected before Christmas the hospitalisation rate to be higher by the new year, and projections always took into account the potential impact of COVID-19 cases in the surrounding NSW region.
"It's really good we're not seeing that impact yet, but it is of course still early days in this Omicron outbreak," she said.
Hospitalisations previously peaked at 21 cases on October 21, during a lockdown to curb transmission of the Delta variant of COVID-19. Intensive care admissions have previously peaked at 12 patients, while the ACT has had a peak of six people requiring ventilation support.
An ACT government spokesman told The Canberra Times in August there were 28 intensive care beds, which could be scaled up to 51 beds and then run at a surge capacity of 110 beds.
Health authorities are expected to provide more detail about hospitalisation projections at an update on Wednesday, when a new epidemiological snapshot of the outbreak will be released.
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Ms Stephen-Smith has previously indicated the ACT could be forced to halt elective surgeries should the level of COVID-19 transmission force a large number of clinical staff into isolation.
"That, I think, has the potential in the health space to be more impactful in some ways than the number of people we have in hospital in terms of our health system capacity and capability," she said in an interview last week.
The ACT reported 514 new cases of COVID-19 in the 24 hours to 8pm Sunday, the highest daily total since the pandemic began.
No new public exposure sites have been identified since Christmas Day, which Ms Stephen-Smith said was partially a result of limited resources over the holiday period.
"[Monitor for symptoms sites] haven't necessarily yielded a very high public health dividend compared to the work that they're really focused on over this period of time. Over the public holidays with limited resources, they've really focused on those high-risk settings," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
ACT Health is also currently reviewing its resource-intensive exposure site notification process, with work underway to develop an automated process using check-in data.
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