In a recent article (Weekend Herald, April 16) John Roughan wrote that the covid-19 pandemic has been an anticlimax in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Surprisingly, he acknowledges covid-19 has killed about 25 million people worldwide, so hopefully he was referring to New Zealand’s 600 deaths. He goes on to ask how many lives we in New Zealand have saved and states that it’s “not the 80,000 based on modelling from the Imperial College London that panicked governments everywhere in March 2020”.

I beg to differ. It is because governments panicked everywhere that the number of deaths so far is “only” about 25 million.

A recent comprehensive assessment of the covid-19 infection fatality proportion — the proportion of people infected with covid-19 who die from the infection — found that in April 2020, before most governments had “panicked”, the infection fatality proportion was 1.5 percent or more in numerous high-income countries. Included were Japan, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Without stringent public health measures, covid-19 is likely to have spread through the entire population, and an infection fatality proportion of 1.5 percent multiplied by 5 million (New Zealanders) equals 75,000.

That’s close to the estimated 80,000 New Zealand lives likely to have been saved because our “panicking” government, like many others, introduced restrictive public health measures.

Public health successes are invisible
What Roughan fails to appreciate is that public health successes are invisible. Unlike deaths, you cannot see people not dying.

Without the initial public health measures and then the rapid development and deployment of highly effective vaccines (unconscionably largely to high-income countries) there would have been far more deaths.

Roughan asks “is this a pandemic?” He states that 25 million covid deaths are only 0.3 percent of the world’s population (“only” 16,000 New Zealand deaths).

How many deaths make a pandemic? In 2020, covid-19 was the number one killer in the UK, responsible for causing about one in 10 deaths in every age group, with each person who died losing on average about 10 years of life expectancy.

In the US, more than 150,000 children have lost a primary or secondary caregiver to covid-19.

So, has our pandemic response been proportionate?

Stringent public health measures were highly effective pre-omicron, but are unsustainable long term.

New Zealand is incredibly fortunate
We are incredibly fortunate that highly effective vaccines were developed so rapidly.

Even the less severe omicron variant is a major killer of unvaccinated people, as demonstrated in Hong Kong, where the equivalent of 6000 New Zealanders have been killed by omicron in the past couple of months, due to low vaccination rates.

Unfortunately, despite our high vaccination rates, we are unlikely to be out of the woods, and it is likely a new covid-19 variant will be back to bite us. The only certainty is that the next variant will need to be even more contagious to overtake omicron.

As long as covid-19 passes to a new host before killing you, there is no selection advantage to a less fatal variant. We are just lucky that omicron was less virulent than delta.

Pandemics over the centuries have often taken several generations to change from being mass killers to causing the equivalent of a common cold.

What response will we accept as proportionate to shorten this process with covid-19 without millions of additional deaths?

As immunity from vaccination or infection wanes, we will need updated vaccines to prevent regular major disruptions to society.

A sustainable proportionate response
Unlike the flu, which has a natural R-value of less than two (one person on average infects fewer than two others), omicron appears to have an R-value of at least 10. That means in the time it takes flu to go from infecting one person to two, to four, to eight people, omicron (without a proportionate response) could go from infecting one to 10 to 100 to 1000 people.

There is no way that endemic covid will be as manageable as endemic flu.

The only sustainable proportionate response to covid-19 is for New Zealanders to embrace universal vaccination.

It is likely that vaccine passes will be required again if we want to live more normally and for society to thrive. It cannot be difficult to make the use of vaccine passes more seamless.

Almost every financial transaction today is electronic and it must be possible to link transactions to valid vaccine passes when required.

Almost 1 million eligible New Zealanders haven’t had their third vaccine dose, yet few are anti-vaccination.

Rather, thanks to vaccination and other public health measures, the pandemic has been an anticlimax for many New Zealanders and the third dose has not been a priority.

As already demonstrated, for the vast majority of New Zealanders, a vaccine pass is sufficient to make vaccination a priority.

Professor Rod Jackson is an epidemiologist with the University of Auckland. This article was originally published by The New Zealand Herald. Republished with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

University of Otago covid-19 experts are not immune to the increasingly vitriolic attacks dished out to scientists commenting on New Zealand’s pandemic response.

Among a litany of attacks University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker has endured over the course of the pandemic, at the start of this week a caller told him he had “a target on his back”.

Professor Baker said he kept the caller on the line for about 20 minutes and asked him what that meant “in real terms”.

The caller was an anti-vaxxer who was accusing Professor Baker of propaganda on behalf of pharmaceutical companies, telling him vaccines were dangerous, especially so for children.

The caller had half-baked information gleaned from various sources that did not really make sense, Professor Baker said.

“He had these slogans he was throwing at me, but when I asked him what he meant he didn’t really have any answers.”

This week it was revealed University of Auckland professors Shaun Hendy and Siouxsie Wiles have argued to the Employment Relations Authority their employer was not doing enough to protect them as they shared their expertise with the public.

Professor would call police
But Professor Baker said he had not raised any concerns for his safety with his employer, the University of Otago.

If anyone made a threat where he felt he or his family was unsafe he would not hesitate to involve the police.

The Wellington-based scientist received the occasional phone call where a caller delivered a stream of abuse and hung up, but Professor Baker said he was most likely to receive abuse in the form of emails, averaging a few attacks by email every day.

As an exercise, Professor Baker began classifying the forms of abuse he received into “five categories of insult”, he said.

There were the incoherent streams of abuse, which were easily dealt with, he said.

Some people had major grievances but did not know where to go, and contacted him to vent and, in some extremely sad cases, he would reply and express sorrow and sympathy.

There were anti-vax propagandists whose positions were not based on facts, which he ignored.

There were those with ideological stances who disapproved of the government’s overall strategy, who at times delved into conspiracy theories.

Personal attacks stream
Finally, the group he found the hardest to deal with came as personal attacks from a small stream of people who persistently contacted him, and tried to undermine his ability to comment.

“Talking about how you look, or how you appear – they’re obviously making quite a concerted effort to look at where you might feel a bit vulnerable,” he said.

The attacks had never made him question his role of speaking publicly about the pandemic response, Professor Baker said.

University of Otago evolutionary virologist Dr Jemma Geoghegan said she, too, had not raised any concerns with her employer.

She said “no” to about 90 percent of media requests because the issues were not related to her field of expertise.

In limiting her media exposure, she had limited the number of people who wanted to harass her about her expertise, Dr Geoghegan said.

“I don’t generally speak about vaccines, so [that] abuse isn’t aimed at me,” the Dunedin scientist said.

‘Weirdly strong views’
However, she had published on covid-19 origins and people had “weirdly strong views about that”.

The issues dealt with by her Auckland counterparts were not surprising though and she had sympathy for them.

“This is happening all around the world,” Dr Geoghegan said.

“I’ve got international collaborators that … I think their mental health has suffered.

“Before covid, or at the start of covid, they were really prominent on Twitter and stuff like that, and now they’ve had to delete their accounts because of the amount of abuse they’ve got.”

Hamish MacLean is an Otago Daily Times journalist. This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ and this story first appeared in the Otago Daily Times

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz