Freedom Day last Wednesday. Had coffee in a café for the first time in, I don’t know, five months, was it? Had lunch in a restaurant the next day. Oh joy, free at last! My club even let me in on Friday to use the gym. When will this freedom ever end? Well, it could end tomorrow, of course, if Perrottet is panicked by dire predictions from the NSW health minister Brad Hazzard or by chief health officer Kerry Chant. Methinks, I shouldn’t make plans too far ahead, when hysterics have the ear of dear leader.
Still, it’s gratifying that locking the State down for months on end, and for the unvaxxed months longer, curbed the virus. It didn’t you say. Apparently, there were 2,558 new cases in NSW on Saturday. That must be a record or something, mustn’t it? Of course, Omicron is having its wicked way. But how wickedly is it dealing with the vaxxed? That’s what I’d like to know.
I looked at the latest surveillance report from health NSW published on 15 December. I suggest some figures are being hidden. To wit, the latest weekly (to Dec 4 in the report) data on the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated admitted to hospitals. They have corresponding weekly ‘case’ numbers. But these are meaningless. They have a breakdown of hospitalisations over six months from June to December. But again, circumstances have changed so much over this period that six-monthly data tells you very little about the most recent trends.
I suspect most of those now being hospitalised are vaccinated. That’s not the kind of message that our betters want out there among the hoi polloi. I checked the latest UK surveillance report (table 9, page 36). Of those 18 years and over entering into emergency care in hospitals in the three or four weeks to the first half of December, 2,965 were not vaccinated; 4,247 were fully vaccinated.
Now you can write glowing reports about the effectiveness of vaccines – and the UK Health Security Agency does – but the raw data tells a tale. As Omicron spreads, I suspect it’s a tale which will test the propaganda arms of public health officialdom and governments.
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