We’ve always known official COVID case data didn't capture the full scope of transmission, but 2022 was the year that Australia lost grip of just how big an underestimate it is.
abc.net.au/news/how-many-covid-cases-are-out-there-as-2022-ends/101812426Since January 1, more than 10 million COVID cases have been diagnosed and reported through either a PCR or RAT test.That’s already a staggering number of cases, when compared to Australia’s 2021 or 2020 totals, but it belies the true number of infections actually occurring.
As someone who’s been reporting on COVID data since the beginning of the pandemic, this has been the question I’ve been asked most often this year.Beyond contact tracing “I would expect case ascertainment is somewhere around 10 to 25 per cent, with a lot of uncertainty," he says. Freya Shearer, who works with University of Melbourne and Doherty Institute teams to produce modelling and ongoing assessments of the pandemic, says we had a “near perfect” case ascertainment rate in 2020, but it started to slip during the Delta outbreaks of 2021.“We definitely lost a handle on what case ascertainment was in December 2021, when Omicron emerged,” Dr Shearer says.
“Australia has a complement of well-established surveillance systems that allow us to understand the aspects of disease transmission that have the greatest public health impact, including the prevalence of severe illness, health system capacity and emerging variants of concern,” a federal health department spokesperson told ABC News.The strategy that all Australian governments have signed onto is about managing COVID-19 consistent with other infectious diseases.
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