Huge change to Gladys Berejiklian's 11am Covid case breakdowns
NSW Health says it will change how the breakdown of its daily Covid-19 cases will be reported every day.
In a statement to Yahoo News Australia, a spokesperson for NSW Health confirmed the department would no longer be reporting the number of unlinked and linked cases at 11am.
The isolation status of cases will also no longer be reported at this time.
"With current case volumes, this data is not a meaningful representation of case investigations," the spokesperson said.
"Updates on the outcomes of all case investigations are published in NSW Health's Covid-19 surveillance reports available online."
You will be able to find the outcomes in the weekly surveillance reports here.
Previously this data was being reported at 11am along with daily case numbers.
The change comes after NSW set a new record for Australia on Thursday with 1029 locally acquired cases reported in a 24-hour period, followed by 882 on Friday.
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On Monday, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian asked people to not focus on the number of Covid cases, instead telling them to focus on the vaccination rate.
“We want to see them go down, no doubt about that, and we're working so hard to make it possible, but the number we need to focus on is a vaccination rate,” she said.
Social media users react to NSW Health's Covid change
People were not happy about the change to what NSW Health would release daily.
"Is this because they’re overwhelmed – or because they don’t want to scare us by confronting us with reality," someone said on Twitter.
One person said this was the "death of transparency".
NSW Health has confirmed to me that it is not going to be reporting the number of linked/unlinked cases or their isolation status at 11am each day. It says those figures are not a meaningful representation of case investigations.
— casey briggs (@CaseyBriggs) August 27, 2021
"One can only presume there are excellent scientists working at @NSWHealth, and they would be very aware of the impacts of selective reporting," someone else said on Twitter.
"Which raises the question: Why are they now hiding data? Has an outside source requested this of them?"
Several people suggested soon the state government would stop reporting case numbers all together and would just report hospitalisations and deaths.
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