Anne Stanley (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health. On 24 June, the minister told the House that having no Australian in ICU due to COVID was a real measure of the government's success. Today there are more than 120 COVID patients in three states in ICU. Isn't that tragic figure a measure of the Morrison-Joyce government's failure?

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I say to the member that there are in fact 131 Australians in ICU. Each one of those lives is fundamentally important and each is a life for which we fight. As I said earlier in question time, the global pandemic has reached over 700,000 cases and taken 14,500 lives in 24 hours alone. It's approaching 4.5 million lives. Officially around the world, as the World Health Organization has said, the real figure is probably between two to three times that.

We're not immune from a global pandemic, a global pandemic that sees our great friend and neighbour New Zealand in a nationwide lockdown right at this moment. But what we have done as a nation is save over 30,000 lives. On an average comparison with the OECD and the tragedy and the lives that they have lost on a per capita basis, that figure is 45,000 lives saved in this country when we look at it by comparison with our other great friends, the United States and the United Kingdom. So many nations have suffered so badly. We're not immune but what we have done as a nation has ensured that we have saved lives on a grand scale.

But every day in a pandemic which has raged around the world and which has ravaged communities, we have to be aware that this is now a pandemic which has become endemic. That means it has embedded itself globally, on all the advice we have, from epidemiologists around the world. That means that we have to have all of our rings of containment—borders, testing, tracing, distancing and vaccination. To see vaccination rates in the last 24 hours at 335,000, to see over 18 million vaccinations and to see a figure amongst our elderly of over 86 per cent and 86.2 per cent for our over 70s and 88.4 per cent in our residential aged-care facilities is to see protection in action, to see these things which have saved lives and protected lives.

All of these elements have come together to ensure that we have a response which has saved, as the Prime Minister has so often said, over 30,000 lives by comparison with our OECD partners and the tragedy that they've faced. It's an ongoing task for the globe, and I think we have to be honest that this is a global pandemic that has become endemic, that has embedded itself around the globe. But we will continue to fight to save every single life.