Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Can the Prime Minister confirm that there were more COVID related deaths in residential aged care in the last eight months under your government than in the first 2½ years of the pandemic under the coalition?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'll ask the Minister for Health and Aged Care to add to this answer, but what I can confirm is that every single death in aged care is a tragedy. Every single human being is someone who was someone's mum or dad or grandfather or grandmother or brother or sister, and it is tragic. I take the opportunity as well to pay tribute to the workers in aged care, who do such an extraordinary job. In particular, over the last few years, the pressure that they've been under because of the COVID pandemic is quite extraordinary.

What the government has done is to work across different levels of government to take the appropriate health advice and to put in place the measures that have been continued in aged care with regard to PPE and appropriate health measures, respecting the fact that people in aged care are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of COVID. The COVID pandemic continues to impact Australians. We have changed the response to it, I think, in an appropriate way but are continuing to make sure that we prioritise assisting people who are in the most vulnerable circumstances.

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

Thank you, Prime Minister, and I thank the member for the question. This is obviously the source of a great deal of tragedy and distress for many hundreds of families as we get towards the back end of this latest wave—the fourth omicron wave. I indicated yesterday that there had been a little more than 800 deaths in residential aged care since October, when this fourth wave started, and about 2,600 deaths over the course of the wave. That is a great tragedy.

We are learning through every wave how better to protect the most vulnerable members of our community, which is really the couple of hundred thousand people who live in residential aged care. We continue to put in place the protections that were started by the former government—strong workforce support; the deployment of rapid antigen tests, which are submitted by visitors and staff alike before they enter; masks and other PPE that the Prime Minister talked about; and, very importantly, the deployment of antiviral medicines that are so effective at preventing severe disease.

The mortality rate for residential aged care over this wave has been that about one in 40 residents who catch COVID has died with it. It was about one in 30 over the course of the other waves in 2022 and about one in three in the early part of the pandemic. It's still a great tragedy but a tragedy that we are continuing to learn from, not just here in Australia but right around the world.