Fig. 1

Number of COVID-19 cases by notification date and count of ward and ICU beds occupied by COVID-19 patients across the New South Wales hospital system. Case notification data is via Data.NSW and the NSW Ministry of Health [34, 35], hospital occupancy data via NSW Ministry of Health Patient Flow System [8]. The number of notified cases may differ from counts reported at that date where later deduplication or reclassification of cases has been performed. Plotted data ranges from 1 July 2021 to 15 February 2022, with the dashed vertical line indicating the end date of the Delta epidemic period/start date of the mixed Omicron-Delta epidemic period for the purposes of this analysis