As the Omicron wave surges on the Gold Coast, the city's health service is dealing with eight wards full of COVID patients, and doctors warn they expect the tail of the peak to be "very long".
Queensland Chief Health Officer John Gerrard said the Gold Coast is now going through or "just passed" its peak, with Brisbane likely to follow next week and then staggered peaks across regional Queensland.
Gold Coast Health's medical director of infectious diseases, Kylie Alcorn, said the hospital has had to quickly adapt to be able to cope with the sharp rise in cases.
"In November we had one COVID ward which was not full, so it's gone from one to eight [wards] very rapidly," Dr Alcorn said.
"We're not sure that we're at our peak, hopefully we are, but we're very cautious about that and also even if we have reached our peak we expect the tail to be very long."
Dr Alcorn said the hospital service had hoped it would only need about four COVID wards but had planned for the worst-case scenario.
"In our planning we had [planned] for many, many more wards to an extra hospital, a makeshift hospital, if it became quite severe," she said.
"So whilst we thought we might get away with three to four wards, we've found we need eight but not to that next level."
Dr Alcorn said while it's a "tiring time" for hospital staff, they are so far coping well but acknowledged there is still a long way to go in the pandemic.
"And whether that's one ward, two wards, three wards, we don't know what it's going to look like in six months, 12 months.
"I think you can safely say that COVID is not going away and we just don't know how many patients we'll have, but there will always be hospitalisation from COVID."
Dr Alcorn said the importance of a third dose of a vaccine is becoming clearer and urged people to get their booster if eligible.
"We're really finding now that you need three vaccinations for a complete course, so it's no longer really a booster but to complete the first course requires three vaccinations," she said.
"And if you've had three vaccines then you're significantly less likely to present to hospital."
As Brisbane readies for its peak in the next week or two, the director of COVID-19 services at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital (RBWH), Andrew Redmond, said the hospital had so far fared well.
The RBWH currently has about 54 COVID patients across three wards, according to Dr Redmond.
He said staff absences due to being close contacts or having COVID had put a "strain on the system" but staff had stepped up "in an admirable way".
"We're a massive hospital and we've got lots of staff and people have really been great about coming in and working in COVID areas even if it's not their main job," he said.
"And so that's … a real strain on staff as well."
Dr Redmond said it would likely take months to catch up on "less urgent" services that had been cut back to focus on COVID care during the peak.
"There has been some cutting back of non-urgent care and that's going to have costs to the patients and to the healthcare service down the track," Dr Redmond said.
"But really we think that's the cost of having a pandemic."
Premier sees promising signs
On Tuesday, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said there were promising signs the impact on the hospital system would not be as severe as initially predicted.
"The fact that our hospitals are going to be reaching those peaks at different times should give Queenslanders a bit more comfort as well," Ms Palaszczuk said.
"It's not everything happening all at once.
"We're very comfortable with the projections at the moment that we have bed capacity.
"At the moment, in heartening news, the track is not as high for the demand of beds as we initially were expecting."
Dr Redmond said people with mild symptoms like a sore throat or runny nose should seek help from their GP rather than go to an emergency department to lighten the load on the hospital system.
"We want to see people here who are getting into significant difficulties or worried that their trajectory is that they're heading towards significant difficulties soon," Dr Redmond said.
"Having breathlessness or pain in your chest or symptoms that are unexpected or severe or not resolving.
"They're the things that we want people to come to hospital with."
