Comedian Jon-Bernard Kairouz (Image: TikTok)

NSW is a crisis. COVID-19 numbers have spiralled out of control. The state is locked down like never before. Residents, voluntarily imprisoned in their own homes for the sake of public health, are desperate for the light at the end of the tunnel, for some hope that their sacrifice is paying off. 

That is why NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian must immediately begin releasing the daily total number of COVID-19 cases on TikTok, the short video social media platform.

If this sounds absurd to you, let me tell you something that’s even more absurd: for the last week a TikTok comedian named Jon-Bernard Kairouz has been releasing the state’s COVID-19 cases before NSW Health, before journalists, before anyone. 

How has he been doing this? He claims it’s through the powers of deduction. It’s more likely to be a contact in NSW Health. Crikey has spoken to at least one person who says they’re in a WhatsApp group chat that releases the COVID-19 numbers after 10PM and has provided some evidence supporting this claim.

But the source of his information is immaterial. What’s important is that a comedian on TikTok — whose previous videos include multiple TikToks of him asking women on the street about their pubic hair preferences — is now a major source of information about NSW’s COVID-19 outbreak. (It should be noted, however, that his COVID number on Monday July 19 was uncharacteristically incorrect.)

The scale of this shouldn’t be underestimated. Since his first prediction about Wednesday’s cases, his videos (showing him predicting case numbers and celebrating each time he’s been correct) have been viewed 17 million times. He’s now got nearly 300,000 followers on TikTok — the majority of those coming since he began “predicting” case numbers — and many more on other social media platforms.

There’s a compelling argument that Kairouz is reaching more people than NSW Health online.  His TikTok about Saturday’s cases got 2.3 million views and 167,000 likes. NSW Health’s Facebook and Twitter’s posts of the numbers the next day got a combined 7,000 engagements. It’s not a apples-to-apples comparison, but it certainly appears to be in Kairouz’s favour.

This matters because, in case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the middle of a public health emergency. With new variants of the virus evolving, cutting-edge research being published daily and restrictions constantly changing, it’s more important than ever before that governments have a direct line of communication with their citizens to keep them up-to-date. Residents can only comply with COVID-19 health measures if they’re aware of them. 

NSW Health should be doing everything and anything it can to cultivate this relationship. Clearly, people want to know COVID-19 case numbers as soon as possible. It appears as if NSW Health gets the daily number of locally acquired COVID-19 cases to 8pm each night and then proceeds to sit on that information for 15 hours while they collect further information and make decisions about policy changes.

But why wait? Why not tweet the numbers — perhaps accompanied by a message saying “stay tuned for restriction announcements at 11AM tomorrow” — out the moment you get them? In doing so, NSW residents are more likely to follow official health department accounts and spread high quality information.

Instead, Gladys Berejiklian and her government’s legion of media advisors and public health experts are being beaten to the punch by Kairouz and, in the process, having the opportunity to reach them directly and develop trust. 

(By the way, this isn’t a scold of Kairouz, who has been very enterprising in turning himself into a national celebrity in just a few days. He should, as the youths say, “get the bread” for informing the public in a way that gets their attention. This same critique also applies to journalists like the ABC’s Raf Epstein who’ve been getting and publishing COVID-19 numbers before the state health authorities can report them.) 

NSW Health shouldn’t just stop at a tweet. Part of Kairouz’s appeal has been his creative ways of announcing the number each day. So, the state, too, must rise to meet this challenge.

The NSW Premier should do the Renegade dance while telling us how many COVID-19 tests were done in the last 24 hours. Chief health officer Kerry Chant should stream herself sifting through the latest COVID-19 publication pre-prints on Twitch. Police deputy commissioner Gary Worboys should do an Ask Me Anything post on Reddit and answer questions directly about why public health restrictions seemed harder on Western Sydney earlier on.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. The state government must pull out all stops to give them as much information as soon as possible to let them know that their sacrifice is working.

That is why if Gladys Berejiklian wants to save her state from COVID-19, she must launch a gold-standard TikTok account.