South Australia's Chief Public Health Officer says it is not clear whether the state has passed the peak of its latest COVID-19 wave, despite the number of new cases reported today being the lowest in more than three weeks.
SA Health reported 3,148 new cases on Friday and there are 341 people with COVID-19 in South Australian hospitals.
Modelling released last week predicted there could be up to 7,000 cases a day by now. Instead, the highest daily number of cases recorded in the current wave has been just over 5,000 last Thursday.
Speaking on Friday to the South Australian parliament's COVID-19 Direction Accountability and Oversight Committee, Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier said it was too early to tell if the state's peak had been reached.
"It may be too early to say that we've reached and gone over our peak, because we've got school going back [on Monday] and children will mix and we may see those infections and transmissions pick-up but, certainty, we haven't seen an increase in numbers this week," Professor Spurrier said.
However, University of South Australia epidemiologist Adrian Esterman said that, by his calculations, the state had hit the peak of infections and was now on a downward trajectory.
Professor Esterman said he was confident because the virus's reproduction rate — which measures how many people a person with COVID-19 passes the virus on to — had dropped.
"If it's less than 1, then the epidemic dies out. So, if we look at a plot of the effective reproduction number, what you see now is it's gone below 1," he said.
"in fact, it's even lower now because this was Wednesday's figure and that tells me now, quite clearly, that the peak has been reached and we've gone past the peak."
On Friday, eight deaths of people with COVID-19 were reported in South Australia. All were men and women in their 80s and 90s.
Some of those deaths were from as far back as February, but were only announced by SA Health today.
Over the past week, SA Health has revealed 66 deaths that it found out about through monthly data released from Births, Deaths and Marriages.
A spokeswoman for SA Health said a doctor at the Communicable Disease Control Branch had to determine if the deaths were due to a notifiable disease or another reason.
Currently, there are 24,321 known active COVID-19 cases in South Australia.
Genomic sampling indicates almost 85 per cent of new cases have been BA.4 or BA.5 sub-variants of Omicron.
