A new Omicron subvariant is expected to be dominant in Canberra within weeks, and experts warn it could put more young people in hospital.
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The ACT recorded 1458 new COVID-19 cases on Tuesday, the highest number since the peak in January, with 116 cases in hospital, putting more strain on the beleaguered health system.
Clinical director for medicine at Canberra Hospital Ashwin Swaminathan said the increased case numbers appeared to be "in part due to the new subvariant".
"The last surveillance that was done last week, the results showed about 20 per cent of Omicron was due to the BA.4 [and] BA.5 subvariants. We expect this to become the predominant strain in the next few weeks," he said.
Chair of epidemiology at Deakin University Catherine Bennett said while much was still unknown about the new subvariant, it was starting to hit people harder than previous variants.
"There's been a little bit of a trend for just a few more people on ventilators who are in hospital ... [as] information is coming out about BA.5 potentially binding to our lung linings which means that more people might experience more than a single head cold or sore throat," she said.
"It might put younger adults potentially in hospital, it might push those group that we think of now as at high risk of serious illness into a wider demographic."
University of South Australia epidemiologist Adrian Esterman also cautioned the possible side effects of the latest strain and has grown frustrated by state and territory governments "who just aren't in the mood for imposing further public health measures".
"We can be a little bit cautious with a new subvariant that is 25 per cent more transmissible than the previous one," he said. Professor Esterman said the number of people in hospital was "almost certain to go up".
"Initial research from Japan shows that the BA.5 prefers the lungs rather than the upper respiratory system and that can potentially lead to more severe disease," he said.
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Dr Swaminathan said "it is not possible to have zero cases of COVID in a hospital when you've got high transmission rates in the community" and it is likely cases will come into parts of the hospital, causing further spread.
"We do see some patients develop COVID whilst being in hospital, it's not a high number, but it is a cause for concern," he said.
A cancer ward at Canberra Hospital had a significant outbreak earlier this week after an initial patient tested positive, leading to approximately 14 others catching the virus.
The ward had "no new cases in patients since last Friday" and so the outbreak is likely to be cleared in the coming days.
High risk areas including hematology, cancer and renal wards had rules adjusted in light of higher community transmission. Meanwhile rules in other parts of the hospital remain unchanged, but Dr Swaminathan said it was a "space to watch".
"We have recommended only some changes to the high risk wards in terms of testing so we've moved away from RAT testing of staff and visitors to PCR testing of people entering those right risk wards," he said.
"At this stage, we've not made any changes to the number of visitors per patient."
Professor Bennett remained hopeful for the "next generation vaccine" to better combat the latest strains since Omicron arrived in December.
"There's always the risk the virus starts to get ahead of us, so that's going to make an Omicron vaccine probably more important because it might then reinstate that protection from serious illness," Professor Bennett said.
"The risk is that we're going to see new variants emerge because we've just got so much viral replication. Every infection trillions of viral replications and mutations are happening at the same time, we've just got to try and get the vaccines to catch up to the variant."
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