Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Health and Aged Care. Repeated infections of COVID-19 tend to be more severe and carry a high risk of persistent symptoms for as long as six months, as well as an increased risk of hospitalisation and death. There's increasing risk of cumulative neurological and cardiovascular disease from repeated infections of COVID-19. COVID-19 infections in this country are at a record high and increasing. Can the minister please explain how he proposes to manage the oncoming national significant burden of disability and chronic illness from repeated infection of COVID-19?

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Put your masks on! (Time expired)

Mark Butler (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Kooyong for her question. She's one of a large number of doctors and health professionals now in this parliament who, together, are going to add enormous quality and depth to our deliberations on health policy. There can be no more important time than right now for that because this pandemic, as the member points out, is still ravaging our community. Official numbers record that more than 300,000 Australians each and every week are being infected with COVID, and we know from zero sampling and other ways that the likely number is more than twice that. We think that as many as half of Australia has contracted COVID just over the course of this year so far.

Our focus right now is on getting through this wave. We have extended support to state hospital systems, we have massively expanded access to fourth dose vaccines and to antiviral treatments and we're encouraging Australians to be COVID-safe and, in particular, as the member points out, to wear masks when indoors and not able to socially distance.

As the member pointed out, and as the member for Higgins pointed out in her beautiful first speech this morning, we also need to come to grips with long COVID. As the member knows, long COVID is not easy to diagnose and it's not easy to treat. The medical literature already reports more than 200 different symptoms being logged, most commonly involving fatigue, shortness of breath and what people are now calling 'brain fog'. Some people's symptoms are disappearing after a few months; others, as the member points out, experience quite specific symptoms that require specific interventions—for example, from a cardiologist. But more and more Australians are suffering longer term multisystem disorders which prove very hard to diagnose and very hard to treat. The truth is we still don't really know the scale of this challenge. A common estimate of about four per cent of COVID patients experiencing long-term symptoms already runs to hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Australians. Support is available through standard Medicare systems. States are operating long COVID clinics, although their waiting lists are growing. But it's increasingly clear to me that we are going to need to develop a focused response nationally to the phenomenon of long COVID.

I have already started work on the next phase of the government's pandemic response, particularly beyond this winter and this third omicron wave. I have already spoken to the Chief Medical Officer about the need to develop focused proposals around long COVID, in particular. It goes without saying that I'm very keen to continue further discussions with the member for Kooyong and other members of this place on this profound long-term health challenge that is proving so debilitating and so distressing for so many Australians.