NSW worker mandate call amid slow boosters
Jack Gramenz |
NSW should follow Victoria’s lead and mandate third-dose COVID-19 booster shots for essential workers, the opposition says.
Labor is also calling for half a day’s leave for essential workers – who are already required to be double vaxxed – to get their booster shot.
Labor says NSW is “last in its booster uptake”, which Opposition leader Chris Minns says they “can’t accept”.
NSW has received the most boosters of any state or territory but a larger proportion of the population is eligible due to being vaccinated earlier.
Some 41.7 per cent of eligible people in NSW have received a third dose of the vaccine, including immunocompromised people, NSW Health said on Thursday.
Adults are eligible for a booster three months after receiving their second dose of a vaccine, which 88.3 per cent of NSW people over 16 had three months ago.
But if they have recently caught coronavirus they are advised to wait until four to six weeks after their infection.
NSW has recorded more than a million cases in the last six weeks.
The state recorded another 12,632 coronavirus cases and 38 deaths on Thursday as hospitalisations continue to fall.
Among the deaths are 22 men and 16 women, nine of them unvaccinated.
Most of the deaths were in people older than 80, with 10 people in their 90s, while 15 were between 50 and 79.
There are now 2578 people now in hospital with the virus, the lowest since mid-January, and 160 people are in intensive care, with 68 on ventilators.
There are 825 more cases of the virus than the previous day but infections have generally fallen during the past two weeks, and the government has warned they could increase again as children return to school.
Some 41 per cent of primary school aged children have now received at least one dose of a vaccine.
The opposition is also pursuing the government over audited financials that showed the state spent more than $155 million on the wrong type of face masks.
Mr Minns says workers will be “understandably furious” that “the NSW government threw out almost as much (personal protective equipment) as they actually used”.
Auditor-General Margaret Crawford’s report on Health and its cluster agencies, released in December, found $775.8 million of PPE “was impaired or written off” in the 2020-21 financial year.
More than 20 per cent of that figure included face masks that did not meet the requirements of the Therapeutic Goods Administration.
Some $217.1 million worth of equipment was disposed because it was expired, faulty, or did not meet regulatory requirements, while $220.2 million of equipment was consumed.
While $656.2 million was spent on adding to the COVID-19 inventory, $558.7 million worth of equipment was “impaired”.
Impaired PPE includes equipment that was unlikely to be used before its expiry date.
Ms Crawford’s report noted there were issues with stocktaking including “a lack of an approach for validating stock expiry dates” and misstatements “caused by data input errors at the various warehouses”.
The audit report covers a period before the peak of the Delta outbreak and before the Omicron wave of infections.
AAP
