TikTok’s coronavirus psychic Jon-Bernard Kairouz has finally got it wrong, after a five-day streak of accurately predicting how many new local cases would be announced each morning in NSW.
Kairouz was adamant there’d be 109 new cases announced today. The good news (for us, at least) is that there were actually only 98 new local cases.
The false guess comes off the back of debunked rumours that he was simply getting his numbers from the government’s COVIDSafe app. Peep the prediction he made on Sunday night below:
@jonbernardk Number Of Cases Tomorrow, Monday The 19th Of July #fyp #sydneylockdown
The Daily Telegraph reports that NSW Health put measures in place to make sure Kairouz didn’t have the right numbers.
It sure does sound like the TikToker was caught up in a government sting, but Health Minister Brad Hazzard told the newspaper: “There was no sting, we are not chasing people but the figures will be distributed on a needs to know basis.”
Sure.
NSW recorded 98 new locally acquired cases of COVID-19 in the 24 hours to 8pm last night. pic.twitter.com/XjBvjJzvKg
— NSW Health (@NSWHealth) July 19, 2021
Towards the end of Monday’s press conference, Hazzard was inevitably asked about the whole TikTok ‘sting’ situation.
“It was a disappointment that for something as serious as our messaging to the community in a pandemic, clearly someone somebody in the system was feeling the need to disclose those figures to somebody who was… not an appropriate person to be making commentary about it, and so, NSW Health looked at the issues around that,”
“I saw someone saying on social media that it was a sting, no it wasn’t. It was looking at what the issues were and making sure that the system was such that the information could be kept until the appropriate time.”
Hearing #TikTokGuy is wrong about today’s estimate of 109 new cases in NSW. Figure was fed to him to ‘smoke out’ his source. #nswcovid #nswpol
— @phannam@mastodon.green (@p_hannam) July 19, 2021
We’ll keep you updated when Kairouz eventually posts an excuse as to why his “calculations” were wrong this time around.
Until then, it looks like we’ll once again have to start tuning into Gladys Berejiklian‘s daily pressers to get that magic number.
