Not a single Covid patient in Australia’s ICU wards has the Omicron variant even a month after the mutant strain arrived on our shores.
Health Minister Greg Hunt downplayed the seriousness of the latest Covid outbreak, insisting ‘you are less likely to go to hospital with Omicron and you are less likely to lose your life with Omicron’.
Australian National University professor Peter Collignon AM told Daily Mail Australia the grim prediction is ‘completely unbelievable’.
‘I don’t know where they’ve come up with this modelling but it’s not based on any real world data,’ he said.
‘They are assumptions that do not correlate to anything we’ve seen before in summer in any other country.
‘If there were 200,000 cases a day, the whole of Australia would be infected in just a few months. That hasn’t happened anywhere in the world.’
Let alone in the summer. With not one patient in hospital having Omicrom?
If the dire prediction is accurate, Australia would have four times the number of cases as Britain did in its horror summer when infections peaked at about 45,000 cases a day.
It also assumes Omicron has the same severity of disease as Delta, something that has yet to be proven and is widely believed to be incorrect by experts.
‘They’ve got twice the population of us and far less vaccination. So I just find that figure unbelievable and not realistic,‘ Professor Collignon said.
We haven’t seen this in South Africa or anywhere else in the world.’
Professor Collignon also explained why the potential reintroduction of mask mandates may not have much of an impact on containing the spread.
‘Face masks might decrease your risks by about 10 per cent but over the medium to long term it won’t really make a lot of difference, particularly in summer when people won’t use them properly. That’s the reality of it,’ he said.
‘I find their figure of 200,000 unbelievable, therefore I find their assumptions about masks probably unbelievable too.’
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