NSW will scrap mask mandates in hospitals within days

ABC NEWS (Australia)

New South Wales looks set to scrap one of the last remaining covid measures within days - mask mandates in hospitals for staff, patients and visitors.

Transcript

00:00 It hasn't really made a big impact in terms of the proportion of cases of COVID that we've

00:07 been seeing, but it's certainly starting to dominate in other parts of the world like

00:11 the United States.

00:13 Look, the nomenclature is really confusing even for us, but basically from BA2, you had

00:21 two types of BA2 that combined many months ago to form something called XBB.

00:28 And from XBB, we've had lots of descendants and relations, including 0.1, 0.9, which has

00:36 dominated much of the Australian winter.

00:39 And ERIS or EG.5.1 is part of that XBB family.

00:45 And it's got two mutations, F456L and Q52H, which make it a bit more evasive.

00:55 But from an Australian point of view, because XBB has dominated our winter, we've got good

01:02 immunity for that.

01:03 And we're seeing that by the fact that the number, the height of the peaks that we're

01:08 seeing and the increased interval between peaks is a good sign that we're doing well.

01:14 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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