This year was Australia's deadliest in the COVID-19 pandemic, however, if not for the nation's high vaccination rates, fatality numbers would have been much worse.
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According to the latest data by COVID Live, which draws and verifies statistics from government sources, since the beginning of the pandemic through to December 9, 2022, there were 16,441 COVID-19 deaths in Australia.
It's a significant rise from 2,082 deaths at the same time in 2021 and a mammoth jump from the same date in 2020 when there were 908 COVID-19 deaths.
"I'm not sure we could have done much to keep those numbers down," Canberra Hospital infectious diseases physician and microbiologist Professor Peter Collignon told ACM.
"Everybody will eventually get infected and when they get infected for the first time, that's when their biggest risk is of dying and getting seriously ill."
Research by the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS) released last month showed that at least two thirds of Australians had been infected by COVID-19 by the end of August, although researchers noted the figure could actually be 15 to 20 per cent higher.
The NCIRS research showed an increase from June 2022, when it found just under half of Australians had been infected at some point since the beginning of the pandemic.
The climbing number of infections in 2022 can be attributed to the fast-spreading Omicron wave, despite the variant's lower severity compared to previous strains of the virus.
Simply, there were more deaths this year because more people were infected with the virus for the first time.
"The reason we didn't have many COVID deaths before the end of last year is because we didn't have much COVID circulating because we managed to suppress it and actually get rid of it for periods of time. But that's not sustainable in the long run," Professor Collignon said.
"Australia was in a very good position compared to most nearly all other countries because we didn't get a lot of spread until we had the population 95 per cent plus vaccinated."
To put the data in a global context, Canada and Denmark had double the COVID deaths per capita than Australia.
In the UK and the US, COVID deaths per capita are fives times Australian fatalities.
Alfred Deakin University chair in epidemiology Professor Catherine Bennett said the efforts the nation had made in getting vaccinated and in lockdowns made Australia's comparatively lower death rate a "hard-won" result.
"We're amongst a very elite group of countries in the world that have less than 600 deaths per million [people] and, you know, compare us to other countries that have had [about] 3000 deaths per million population," Professor Bennett told ACM.
"Our 16,000 is a sad metric, because that's individual lives that were lost.
"But at the same time ... we shouldn't underestimate how hard won that was and why it was such an important strategy for us."
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Both experts agree Australia will not return to lockdowns as the virus continues to evolve into a mix of variants and more of the population gains hybrid immunity; a combination of protection from vaccines and infection.
Deakin's Professor Bennett said now that Australia was out of "emergency mode" the nation's major COVID challenge next year would be addressing the effects of long COVID.
"We've still got a lot to navigate, we're still adjusting to having a new human pathogen in our community," she said.
"This is a long-haul job, and we've still got work to do particularly with long COVID. We've got to focus on that now."
A federal government inquiry into long COVID and repeated infections by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Health, Aged Care and Sport began in September.
An update report was handed down on December 5, and the committee's final report is expected to be released in 2023.
