Epidemiologists play down Brad Hazzard’s Covid-19 warning that NSW could hit 25,000 cases a day in January

Epidemiologists have weighed in on Brad Hazzard’s controversial warning that NSW could reach 25,000 Covid-19 cases a day by the end of January.

Brad Hazzard’s warning that Covid-19 cases could surge to 25,000 a day by the end of January in NSW has been refuted by epidemiologists.

The Health Minister made the controversial prediction on Wednesday following the state’s largest daily increase of new infections since September 10, 1360 cases.

“Given the reproductive rate of 1.5, or thereabouts, the modelling from the Epidemiology Public Health Unit at the University of NSW is telling us is that by the end of January we could be looking at 25,000 cases of the virus every single day,” Mr Hazzard said.

“On my maths, that takes us to about 175,000 cases in a week. That’s one big difference from 1360 cases we see today, which already is a cause for concern.”

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard says the state could have 25,000 cases a day by the end of January. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Flavio Brancaleone

But infectious disease expert Peter Collignon said he found it “hard to believe” cases could even reach that high and called it a “gross overestimation”.

“There is no evidence that vaccines in the real world are failing us against Omicron – we need to take into account the things that matter and they are serious illness and death and there is evidence that vaccines are protecting us against these risks,” he said.

“We’ve got a level of fear that is not proportionate to the data.

“With the current measures in place the whole state would grind to a halt if we hit 25,000 cases a day. There's no way it would happen and no way contact tracers would be able to follow up those many people.”

Mr Hazzard did, however, remind NSW that concerning modelling in the past had been proved wrong.

“Now I’ll remind everybody that in our first year of the pandemic, we had similar modelling that told us we’d have 25,000 deaths in the first year,” he said.

“But because the community responded, because they actually wore masks and socially distanced and did all that they were asked to do by public health, we managed to keep those deaths down considerably.

“So we may not get to 25,000 cases every day – but we could.”

NSW recorded 1742 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday, a jump from the 1360 infections on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gaye Gerard

Deakin University epidemiology chair Catherine Bennett was also sceptical about the prediction.

She said the modelling was based on assumptions the state “didn’t adopt any Covid-safe measures and let the virus run”.

“That’s never been our plan under the national ‘live with the virus plan’,” she said.

“Most won’t even know they have the infection, most won't know if and where they’ve been exposed and most won’t have symptoms – it’s only if 25,000 people happened to be tested that they know they are positive.

“Look at Sydney and the highest rolling average of daily case numbers was 1268, which coincided with peak hospitalisations of 242 – 25,000 cases a day is 20 times the peak of cases we had. Are we going to have 4000 people in ICU with 90 per cent of the population vaccinated? The answer is no.”

NSW recorded 1742 new Covid-19 cases on Thursday, a jump from the 1360 infections on Wednesday.

Of Thursday’s cases, 122 were identified as being infected with the Omicron variant. No new deaths were recorded.

Originally published as Epidemiologists play down Brad Hazzard’s Covid-19 warning that NSW could hit 25,000 cases a day in January