Data shows COVID-19 hospitalisations in NSW may have plateaued, but experts are hesitant to declare the Omicron outbreak has peaked.
Data from NSW Health shows the seven-day average increase in the number of people in hospital has slowed in the past few days, with 2,816 now in hospital.
ICU average numbers have also been steady for nearly a week.
Modelling released by the NSW government in early January suggested hospitalisations would peak around January 22, though at the much higher level of 4,700.
NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant was cautious about the numbers.
"I'm always loath to call the decline," she said. "A few days doesn't make a trend.
"But it is really pleasing when we look across our absenteeism data, our hospitalisation data, our case data."
Health Minister Brad Hazzard said advice from experts suggested the Omicron outbreak had peaked in NSW, but he had learned to "never say anything with absolute certainty".
Meru Sheel, an infectious diseases expert from the University of Sydney, said the true extent of infection in the community was unknown.
Asymptomatic infections due to the mild nature of Omicron, as well as less contact tracing and a shortage of rapid antigen tests were all contributing to the uncertainty, she said.
She said once more rapid antigen tests became available, and the number of people working returned to normal in the next week or two, the proportion of people not getting tested, or missed, would stabilise.
"And that's when we'll be able to know definitely what the trends are looking like," she said.
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet said the government was more focused on hospitalisations, ICU figures and deaths than case numbers.
"I think if you look at those hospitalisations and ICU numbers, the key factor in that has been vaccination," he said.
Data from NSW Health showed just 1 per cent of cases (4,100 out of 379,056 cases) were hospitalised as part of the Omicron outbreak from November 26 last year to January 8.
In comparison, 10 per cent of cases needed to be hospitalised during the Delta outbreak last year.
Up to January 8, 98 people had died during the Omicron outbreak, about 0.03 per cent of cases.
Since then, 401 more people have died, though case numbers during that time have become harder to measure.
On January 5, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced that positive results from rapid antigen tests did not need to be confirmed by a PCR test.
Testing rates in NSW fell from 16.9 per 1,000 people in the week ending December 18, 2021 to 10.07 per 1,000 people in the week ending January 8, 2022.
NSW Health did not begin reporting rapid antigen test results until January 13.
Dr Chant said she expected to see an uptick in transmission when children returned to school next week.
"I just want to say that this can be mitigated by the actions of you as individuals," she said.
"Getting those boosters will help us."
Dr Sheel said any increase was likely to be small.
"As long as we can isolate the cases early by testing them early, then we will expect it to not lead to bigger outbreaks. And that's the point [of] a bi-weekly testing surveillance program," she said.
