The ACT recorded another COVID-19 death on Thursday as pressure builds for modelling to be publicly released.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
ACT Health Minister Rachel Stephen-Smith announced $84 million of additional funding to boost the health workforce and to "improve workforce planning" with 400 additional healthcare workers.
"This funding is really about recruiting more healthcare workers to our incredible frontline health workforce," she said.
Simultaneously, 149 people with COVID-19 were in hospital on Thursday, contributing to Canberra's winter strain on hospitals.
"This is a really important announcement in recognising the workload issues that our staff are facing and the increasing demand on our health services," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
As the winter case numbers continue to stay high, with Thursday's numbers hitting 1000, pressure is mounting on whether Doherty Institute and Australian National University modelling would be released.
MORE COVID-19 NEWS:
Ms Stephen-Smith acknowledged "there's been quite a significant view that we need to be transparent with the public" but fell short of confirming if the modelling would be released soon.
"We'll have another conversation at our health minister's meeting this evening with all of the state and territory health ministers and Minister Butler," Ms Stephen-Smith said.
"The Doherty modelling isn't my decision to make about whether that's released and I think if we do release modelling, it would be useful to release all of the different types of modelling that we've had.
"Different modelling is showing different projections in terms of where the pandemic is going, whether we've already peaked, whether we're going to peak in Omicron cases through August and September and then what that looks like in terms of actual cases versus reported cases."
While the ACT government owns the ANU modelling, Minister Stephen-Smith cautioned against releasing it separately to Doherty modelling.
"It's only one piece of the puzzle, so it is an active conversation about how we release that modelling but I think it would be better if we're going to release modelling if we can actually do that in a coordinated way so that people can see all of the different findings that the different types of models are delivering," she said.
Our coverage of the health and safety aspects of this outbreak of COVID-19 in the ACT is free for anyone to access. However, we depend on subscription revenue to support our journalism. If you are able, please subscribe here. If you are already a subscriber, thank you for your support. You can also sign up for our newsletters for regular updates.