A prominent Illawarra health researcher has pointed out that COVID-19 deaths in Australia are now topping the 2021 national road toll in the space of about three weeks, questioning why there is such indifference to the virus.
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Professor of UOW's Health Services Research and Director of the Australian Health Services Research Institute Kathy Eager said there had been 324 COVID deaths in the past week, after 308 deaths the week before.
"The [Australian] road toll for 2021 was 1,133 deaths," she wrote on Twitter on Sunday.
"The annual road toll is now equivalent to 3 weeks of COVID deaths. Have we become so indifferent we just don't care?"
In the Illawarra, there were seven new deaths in the week ending June 18, following nine deaths in the Illawarra health district the week before.
According to an analysis of both local health district data and the weekly NSW Health respiratory reports, there have been 128 deaths in this region so far in 2022.
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.
Also as a comparison, in 2019 there were a reported 1080 Australians who died with influenza.
COVID-19 is expected to kill 15,000 Australians by the end of the year, leaving many to question why apathy to these deaths has set in.
In reply to Prof Eagar, author and commentator Jane Caro said she thought the indifference was "because most of those who die are old and ageism is the great unspoken prejudice in our society".
Newcastle University immunologist Associate Professor Nathan Bartlett has described the rising death toll as "critical" and "unacceptable".
"People just want to move on, so largely, we seem to becoming a bit desensitised to the deaths," Professor Bartlett said.
"But this number of deaths each week is really not acceptable over the long term."
University of Sunshine Coast, Queensland infection prevention specialist, Matthew Mason said there was a need to consider "what does living with COVID actually look like".
"Not what do we want it to look like, but what does it actually and I think what's happening is we've got the community as a broader community, we going, this is what we want it to be like," he said.
"No-one wants to go back to lockdowns and mandates and all those sorts of things, and we don't need to because we now know more than we did when we were doing that.
"This 'we've got to live with it, so just get on with it as though it's not there' [mentality] and ignoring the fact that we have people, lots of people dying because of it and lots of people who can't go on about their lives as normal and just go, well, that's their problem, not ours. I don't think we can do that."
- with ACM reporters.