By Martin Cole-
Australia’s chief medical officer has slammed what he described as ”selective and misleading’ media reports about the relatively weak Omicron variant, which though very transmissive has not led to hospitalisation and deaths in Australia, given its milder nature compared with the Delta variant.
Professor Paul Kelly attacked the modelling which claimed over 200,000 new infections a day and 4,000 daily hospitalisations.
The highly esteemed professor said he believed the predicted hospitalisation estimations for Australia are unlikely, and disputed it would lead to hospitalizations and deaths as predicted by the doomsayers.
Kelly’s assessment is also relevant to wild predictions being made in England and the U.S by so-called experts potentially seeking attention by coming up with modelling that often turns out to be off the mark. Evidence of people being brought to hospital mainly due to the omicron variant, or a trigger by the omicron variant that wouldn’t have otherwise brought the patients to hospital are very rare at the moment across the world.
Professor Kelly was addressing the leaked Doherty modelling, which predicted there would be 4,000 hospitalisations a day based on the ‘conservative assumption’ that Omicron is just as severe as Delta, even though evidence to date shows it is milder.
This would lead to between 8,000 and 10,000 patients in ICUs over the course of the wave, based on modelling of how many would get sick enough to need it – even with Covid booster rollouts in full swing.
‘Evidence about the characteristics of Omicron is still emerging but early trends seen both internationally and within Australia suggest that it is more transmissible,’ he said.
‘However, early indications around hospitalisation, ICU admission and death show that Omicron could be far less than Delta and other variants.
‘Importantly, after almost four weeks of Omicron in Australia there are currently no confirmed Omicron cases in ICU and no deaths confirmed to date.’
‘Omicron is here in Australia, it will be an unwanted guest with us for Christmas, but we can and must do what we can to reduce its impact on each of us and our loved ones.’
While Professor Kelly recognised modelling is an important tool in government decision-making, it’s one of a range of tools and can’t be viewed in isolation.
‘A preliminary scenario, of many being considered to help inform decision making, presents one of the worst case of all potential scenarios including assumptions that the Omicron variant is as severe as the Delta variant, an absence of hospital surge capacity, a highly limited booster program, no change to baseline public health and social measures and an absence of spontaneous behaviour change in the face of rising case numbers,’ he added.
‘None of these five assumptions represent the likely state of events, let alone all of them together, therefore presenting that scenario as the likely scenario that will occur is highly misleading.’
He says public health and social measures will have an impact on slowing the spread of the Omicron variant.
‘For now, there are some easy steps we can take as individuals to help our community, including practicing good hand hygiene and wearing a mask when indoors,’ Professor Kelly said,.
‘It protects you and it protects the people around you. I am already putting my mask on wherever I go. It’s a simple defence that can help us all.’
Former deputy chief health officer Nick Coatsworth similarly blasted the leak after he claimed people calling for more restrictions amid rising case numbers would be proven wrong.
‘Whoever leaked the Doherty modelling without context has committed a gross injustice to the Australian people,’ he tweeted on Wednesday.
The leaked Doherty modelling predicted there would be 4,000 hospitalisations a day based on the ‘conservative assumption’ that Omicron is just as severe as Delta, even though evidence to date shows it is milder.
Meanwhile, Australian National University professor Peter Collignon has slammed the grim prediction as ‘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 told Daily Mail Australia on Tuesday night.
‘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.’
‘They’ve got twice the population of us and far less vaccination. So I just find that figure unbelievable and not realistic.
‘We haven’t seen this in South Africa or anywhere else in the world.’
In England, professor Neil Ferguson – a leading epidemiologist and government adviser who was nicknamed Professor Lockdown last year after his dire warnings about the number of deaths in the pandemic
has been ridiculed for coming up with the modelling that led to the country’s lockdown in 2020, only for the British government to eventually admit that the death rates had been falsely documented , after doctors put down people who had been killed in a car crash as having died of covid, just because they had recently tested positive for the virus.
Ferguson predicted in 2009 that 65,000 people would die from swine flu, but in fact only 457 lost their lives. These figures refer to the UK, where swine flu (also known as H1N1), did indeed cause 457 deaths.
Professor Ferguson’s comments on the possible deaths from the bird flu outbreak in 2005, stating:“Around 40 million people died in [the] 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” he told the newspaper. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”
The number of deaths from Spanish Flu has been estimated at around 50 million. There have been 455 worldwide deaths from the bird flu strain known as H5N1 but it has not been detected in humans in the UK.
Professor Ferguson also produced a paper estimating the number of potential deaths from bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) infection in the sheep population in the UK in 2002.
Image:medicalschool.anu.edu