Australia: Hospital-acquired COVID was responsible for more than 6,000 cases and nearly 300 deaths in New South Wales last year.

New South Wales (NSW) Health data released last month under freedom of information laws shows 6,007 patients contracted COVID in the state’s public hospitals in 2023. This resulted in 297 deaths, meaning that 14 percent of the state’s fatal COVID infections were acquired in a hospital.

Liverpool Hospital in Sydney, New South Wales (Photo: Western Sydney Regional Councils Media)

The data, which also covers the first four months of this year, shows similar infection and death rates persist, with 1729 patients contracting COVID in NSW hospitals and 86 dying between the start of January and the end of April.

The NSW figures match previously revealed Victorian data which showed 6,212 patients contracted COVID in the state’s public hospitals and 586 died in 2022 and 2023.

This is a direct result of the deliberate and planned lifting of virtually all public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID, including the lifting of mandatory mask wearing in hospitals. This “forever COVID” pro-business policy, adopted by governments around the world, was spearheaded in Australia by Labor at state and federal levels.

The NSW hospital infection figures were the result of a dogged 18-month campaign by lawyer Peter Vogel. Its first application for public access to government information to the Ministry of Health was submitted in February 2023. It was rejected because the department said, according to Vogel: “It would take 140 hours to produce a report showing the number of COVID cases in hospitals.” cases.”

After Vogel requested an internal review, the department responded in July 2023 that it “does not maintain complete and accurate records of hospital-acquired (hospital-acquired) infections.”

It was not until June 2024, after numerous additional Freedom of Information requests to other agencies and repeated denials that any part of the NSW government or health bureau had records of hospital-acquired infections, that the Department of Health admitted that it had the information it was seeking advocate. . Even then, the company claimed that the report would take 31 hours to complete and Vogel would have to pay $930 for it. The data was finally provided to Vogel on September 17.

This is just one example of the extent to which serious illness and death from the ongoing COVID pandemic is being deliberately covered up by the state and federal Labor governments. With the help of the corporate media, virtually all reports about the deadly virus have been suppressed to provide false justification for profit and the unscientific rollback of basic infection control measures.

All testing and reporting infrastructure was destroyed. Only two states, New South Wales and Western Australia (WA), continue to test wastewater samples for COVID, while hospitalization data in most jurisdictions is only reported intermittently.

What’s most striking is that COVID deaths are no longer reported in NSW, Queensland, WA or the Northern Territory unless they are part of overall mortality statistics released months after the fact. The presentation of these national death rates, produced by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), has been changed to confuse the ongoing significant increase in annual deaths.

According to outdated and incomplete official data, COVID contributed significantly to or was a major cause of more than 23,500 deaths between January 2022 and September 2024, about a quarter of which occurred in aged care facilities.

In a grim rebuttal to the lie that the pandemic is over, COVID deaths this year stood at 497.5 per month, barely lower than the 512 per month recorded in 2023.

The fact that so many fatal COVID infections have been recorded in health and aged care settings highlights that, in line with capitalist governments around the world, the Australian state and federal Labor governments are committing social murder targeting the most vulnerable people in society .

Dr. Stefan Bushusha (Photo: Deakin University)

Dr Stefan Bushusha, president of the Australasian College of Infection Prevention and Control, told the ABC the infection data at the NSW hospital was “worrying and tragic”.

He said: “This is the core purpose of infection prevention and control… The premise that we can afford some deaths is, in my view, wrong.

“We know how COVID is transmitted and we know how to prevent healthcare-associated infections,” Bushusha said, referring to the need for good ventilation and air filtration, testing and contact tracing, isolating infected patients and requiring healthcare workers to wear masks .

Many of these measures were introduced early in the pandemic and had a significant impact in reducing the spread of infection in health care settings, but have since been abandoned.

This flies in the face of decades of medical advances and long-standing infection control measures in hospitals. For example, there are long-established protocols for identifying and preventing the spread of infections caused by golden staphylococcus, a hospital-acquired bacterium that can be resistant to antibiotics.

In New South Wales, the lifting of COVID-related public health measures began under Perrottet’s Liberal-National government but was completed under the Labor government led by Premier Chris Minns. This could not have been accomplished without the help of the health unions, which controlled every reckless and unscientific step of the process.

In 2022, Health Services Union (HSU) national president and NSW Secretary of State Gerard Hayes was at the forefront of calls for COVID isolation requirements for medical staff to be lifted due to the perceived impact of such measures on the “economy”.

In August 2023, HSU hailed the NSW Labor government’s removal of mask requirements in public hospitals as a “health milestone”.

The HSU, along with the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, are promoting the lie that COVID is a thing of the past, completely separate from worker disputes over pay and working conditions in recent years. This struggle included numerous mass strikes by more than 10,000 nurses and midwives, but year after year union leaders forced a sell-out, cutting real wages to meet government demands.

The reality is that the fight for decent working conditions in health care is inseparable from the fight to end the COVID pandemic, which has significantly worsened the dire state of a public hospital system that, after decades of unionization, faces chronic staffing and resource shortages. forced government cuts.

To achieve this, healthcare workers will have to take matters into their own hands. Hospitals and health care facilities must establish rank-and-file committees independent of unions, and the fight for patient and staff safety is linked to the fight for real improvements in workers’ wages and working conditions.

This should first include reintroducing infection control measures, including masks and isolation, in all healthcare workplaces. But until the virus is allowed to circulate unchecked in the wider population, protecting patients and hospital staff will be a constant struggle.

Healthcare workers and the working class as a whole must begin the fight to eliminate COVID worldwide. This is possible, but not within a capitalist system that rejects public health measures as unprofitable, and not within a single country.

Workers in Australia and around the world are faced with an existential need to fight for a political alternative to the ruling class’s agenda of endless infection, disease and death. Only by fighting for a workers’ government to implement socialist policies can society’s rich resources be taken away from banks and corporations and used to rid the world of COVID and create high quality public health care freely available to all.

Australia: Hospital-acquired COVID was responsible for more than 6,000 cases and nearly 300 deaths in New South Wales last year.

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