'Are you compromised?' Premier responds to TikTok Covid case leaker

A comedian has announced NSW Health’s daily coronavirus cases hours ahead of the premier for three days running leading to Gladys Berejiklian being asked if the health department has been “compromised”.

Jon-Bernard Kairouz said in a TikTok video posted on Thursday night, the state would report 97 new cases on Friday before they were announced at 11am. This proved to be correct and Mr Kairouz also was proven right about Wednesday’s and Thursday’s numbers in separate videos.

Ms Berejiklian was asked whether NSW Health had been “compromised” and someone had been leaking the figures to Mr Kairouz ahead of the releases.

“All we can do is focus on the job at hand, and at the moment, a lot of people have alleged to have various bits of information and bits of advice, and that’s welcome. We are in a democracy,” she said.

“But what is important to us as a team, as team NSW, is a focus on what is necessary and that is to lead a state during its most challenging of times, and I can’t stress that enough.”

NSW Health urges people to rely on official information

Yahoo News Australia asked NSW Health about the videos.

In a statement, a department spokesperson urged people “to use trusted and credible sources of information to inform them about the most up to date Covid-19 information in NSW”.

“Please access Covid-19 health advice and information from official channels including NSW Health and NSW Government,” the spokesperson said.

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Mr Kairouz’s videos feature him using a whiteboard and seemingly using mathematics to determine the totals. One man labelled him as literally being Matt Damon's genius character from the film Goodwill Hunting and his TikTok clips have received hundreds of thousands of views.

The Kairouz probability theorem

Mr Kairouz told Studio 10 on Friday “it’s cold hard maths” and used the board in his videos as evidence of him performing equations to determine the totals.

“Me and my brothers work hard, and we take everything into account,” he told Studio 10.

“The data is changing every day. And as I said, it’s just the Kairouz probability theorem.”

He added suggestions he knows people or is somehow related to the premier in some capacity as “the furthest thing from the truth”.

Mr Kairouz told the Fitzy & Wippa program on Nova FM he and his brothers look at the circumference of southwest Sydney, which has harboured much of NSW's coronavirus transmission, and the number of infectious cases in the community.

He added people have also asked him to predict Victoria's Covid numbers and one man asked him if his wedding will still be on in August.

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