Restrictions are lifting and life in many ways may be returning to normal, but the Illawarra has just lived through its deadliest fortnight of the pandemic.
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Sixteen local people have died since Valentines Day, according to the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District figures.
And, since New Year's Day, there have been 54 deaths in the Illawarra Shoalhaven.
These numbers are in sharp contrast to the deaths in all of 2021 and 2020, when a total of 23 people died from COVID-19 in the almost two year period.
Professor Kathy Eagar, the Director of the Australian Health Services Research Institute at the University of Wollongong, said the deaths were no surprise given the sharp rise in cases at the start of the year.
"Deaths always lag cases by about four to six weeks," she said.
With case numbers still high compared with most of the pandemic, she said the death toll would continue to rise in the coming weeks.
"People who are saying that the pandemic is on the way to being over are not looking at the international evidence," she said.
"COVID comes in outbreaks, and we are starting to see the end of this outbreak. But nobody should believe this is the last outbreak.
"Hopefully we will get a bit of a respite now that we've got such high rates of vaccine but there will be another outbreak sometime between now and into winter."
However, she said two doses of the vaccine was not enough to protect people from the current Omicron variant, and was concerned that the current triple-vaccinated rate - around 50 per cent of residents in the Illawarra - was not enough to protect people from the next wave of Omicron.
Prof Eagar said the Omicron BA.2 variant was now making up about six per cent of Australian COVID-19 cases, with the new variant even more contagious than Omicrom BA.1 which caused the most recent wave.
In the Illawarra, as across Australia, most of the people who have died in recent weeks have been older or had underlying health conditions.
According to the local health districts daily updates, more than two thirds of the people who have died locally in the past two moths have been aged over 80.
Prof Eagar said a significant proportion of these deaths had occurred in aged care.
"The most common reason for this is because they had not received three doses of the vaccine," she said.
"We have had 742 aged care deaths in the last six weeks in Australia, we're having 90 death a week in aged care across the country."
In the week ending February 18, there were at least nine deaths in local aged care facilities. The federal government's latest aged care snapshot shows seven people from Warrigal Mount Terry died, with one death at Warrigal Care Warilla, and another at IRT Woonona.
Prof Eagar noted people in aged care represented about 0.7 per cent of the Australian population, but 35 per cent of COVID deaths, and said it was important not to be complacent as restrictions continue to lift.
"Everyone wants the pandemic to end, I absolutely understand that, but we should absolutely avoid this concept of COVID fatalism," she said.
"I personally think that is completely unethical, and it diminishes us as a society to say this group of people is really old and frail and they were going to die anyway and we need to open the economy again and if they die along the way, so be it."
She said another lockdown was not the answer, but that "sensible public health measures" needed to be maintained for the most vulnerable.
These measures included full vaccination for all aged care residents, "impeccable infection control", and for families coming into aged care to follow all good public health measures and be vaccinated, she said.
"We don't want people in aged care to be locked up as prisoners in order to keep them safe, and that means everyone around them doing everything they can," Prof Eagar said.
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Kate McIlwain
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
For more than a decade, I've helped the Illawarra Mercury set the news agenda across the region. Currently I'm the paper's health reporter - covering the stories of Illawarra workers and residents in the wake of a global pandemic and at a time where our health systems are stretched to the limit.
