Thread by @DarylTractor

Question: Every day @GladysB downplays the number of Covid-positive people in the community while infectious.

Yesterday, she claimed that 20 of the 97 cases didn’t isolate while infectious.

The actual figure, from NSW Health, is about twice that: (cont)

A further 17 ppl were in the community for ‘some’ of their infectious period, and the isolation status of 7 more positive people was unknown.

Potentiality, that could be 43 roaming around, passing the virus on to others.

The strangest thing is, this misleading figure is (cont)

a key metric for deciding when NSW’s lockdown will end, @gladysb constantly says. She said yesterday’s figure of “20” was a sign things were headed in the right direction.

And the media, from Sky to ABC to Guardian, faithfully reports this 20 figure when it’s likely double.

Is it not the half-pregnant thing? If someone infectious goes out for one day, to some shops, a bank, on a bus, that’s a lot of people potentially exposed.

Are those exposure sites also disregarded because they were in isolation for some of their infectious time? Of course not.

The media needs to more accurately capture the situation, and read the information supplied by NSW Health, rather than taking as gospel the Premier’s misleading rhetoric.

Remember how well “mopping up” and “green shoots” panned out?

#nswcovid19

Here’s why it’s important, via @BrattoDavisu

Update: A journalist asked about this exact scenario - I believe it was @AshleighRaper.

The Premier gave an extremely long-winded response that basically boiled down to “because it’s more important that some were in the community their entire infectious period”.

Brett Sutton with some sensible advice on the situation: @VictorianCHO

https://twitter.com/attempt57/status/1417301468252569601

Interesting data on this from @juliette_io:

https://twitter.com/juliette_io/status/1417298019301560322