ADELAIDE, Australia—Australia passed 500,000 Covid-19 cases, and infections have begun to accelerate in India and parts of Southeast Asia that had appeared to be getting on top of the virus in recent months.
The top health official in Australia’s Queensland state said people with the Omicron strain were on average infecting as many as 10 others, raising concerns that the country’s medical system could be overwhelmed soon. Omicron “has completely changed all the planning,” said Dr. John Gerrard, Queensland’s chief health officer.
Australia recorded nearly 48,000 cases on Tuesday, a record. The country relaxed restrictions on international travel in November and has dialed back other measures, including those concerning the movement of unvaccinated people. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said people should be less fixated on total cases and focus more on hospitalization rates.
Still, Mr. Morrison’s push to shift the burden of testing from dedicated centers that take swabs from people and process them in pathology labs to at-home testing kits hasn’t eased stress on the healthcare system. Long lines remain outside testing centers, with some closing to focus on processing a backlog of tests. Supermarket and pharmacy shelves have been emptied of the kits.
“If this is ‘stable’ I’d hate to see exponential,” Dr. Omar Khorshid, the Australian Medical Association’s president, recently tweeted. “The previous curves were turned by lockdowns. Not hard to predict the future.”
Mr. Morrison said hospital data could be inflated by Covid-19-positive patients admitted for other ailments. In New South Wales state, home to Sydney, health officials said on Tuesday that 1,344 Covid-19 patients were in hospitals, up from 557 a week earlier.
Epidemiologists have urged the government to distribute at-home tests free of charge amid concerns that people with low incomes won’t get tested if they can’t afford them. The government has resisted calls to do so, encouraging supermarkets and pharmacies to order more.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said Tuesday that it is monitoring the cost and availability of at-home tests, amid fears of price gouging.
Australia is developing into a case study of how quickly Omicron can spread and challenge health settings when governments unwind tight restrictions. It offers lessons for other countries in Asia that are weighing their response to Covid-19 outbreaks against the economic damage that tightening restrictions can inflict. Roughly 77% of Australia’s population has had two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data, a pandemic research project at the University of Oxford.
A student got vaccinated against Covid-19 in Chennai, India, on Monday.
Photo: Sri Loganathan/Zuma Press
India reported 37,379 new Covid-19 cases on Tuesday, the highest level of daily infections in nearly four months.
On Monday, Satyendar Jain, the health minister of Delhi, said that more than 81% of Covid-19 samples that underwent genomic sequencing in the past two days were the Omicron variant.
“Delta doesn’t spread this fast,“ said Dr. G.C. Khilnani, former head of pulmonary medicine at the All India institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. ”It looks like the rising cases are being driven by Omicron. We need to watch the rate of hospitalizations now, as even a small percentage can be huge for a country like India.”
Nearly 44% of India’s more than 1.3 billion people have received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to Our World in Data.
Cities and states across the country have imposed new restrictions on businesses and movement. The Delhi government imposed a weekend curfew on Tuesday. Last week, it had imposed one for nighttime and ordered the closure of schools, gyms, and movie theaters.
Mumbai banned New Year’s celebrations and prohibited people from visiting beaches, parks and other public spaces from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Infections are also rising in the Philippines, reversing a monthslong trend of falling Covid-19 caseloads. The country has regularly reported 2,000 to 4,500 daily infections since Christmas Day, after logging fewer than a thousand a day for more than a month starting in mid-November.
The share of Covid-19 tests coming back positive has also increased, from just under 1% during the week of Dec. 12 to 11.2% last week. The country has recorded local transmission of the Omicron variant, but given limited capacity for genomic testing, it isn’t known how much of the current surge is being driven by that strain.
The Philippines has urged all those who are showing symptoms of Covid-19 to get tested and to isolate. Around 45% of the Philippines’ population is fully vaccinated, according to Our World in Data.
— Shan Li in New Delhi and Jon Emont in Singapore contributed to this article.
Write to Rhiannon Hoyle at rhiannon.hoyle@wsj.com
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