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

New Zealand’s Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, says covid-19 case numbers have passed their peak in Auckland, the country’s largest city, but that people should remain vigilant.

Dr Bloomfield said there were 20,907 new community cases of covid-19, a further 15 deaths and 1016 people in hospital in today.

He said the latest analysis showed covid-19 case numbers had passed their peak in Auckland, and were tracking down in all three district health boards.

Dr Bloomfield said that analysis also showed case numbers nationally — not including Auckland — were also slowing. They increased just 1 percent in the seven days to March 20, compared to a 44 percent increase in the week ending March 13.

The pattern did differ by DHB, with cases still increasing in the South Island, although there were encouraging signs they were peaking in the Midland region and in the Wellington region.

He said case numbers appeared to be largely now following the modelling for a high-transmission scenario. Case numbers were higher than the modelling suggested, and Dr Bloomfield said this may be because most cases in New Zealand were the BA.2 subvariant.

Hospitalisations in the northern region were also levelling off.

“We’re watching carefully and the expectation is that they will start to drop as the week progresses,” Dr Bloomfield said.

“The average length of stay for people on wards in the Auckland hospitals who have been discharged is now 3.2 days compared to just over two days last month, and the average stay in intensive care is five days.

“This increase in average length of stay reflects that we’re now seeing that people who are needing longer care, they may even be over their covid infection but they have symptoms that need to be managed, often from underlying conditions.”

Watch the update 

Video: RNZ News

Dr Bloomfield said that even though cases in hospital in Auckland were staying high, the number of new admissions each day was dropping quickly. But because those being admitted now were sicker and required longer care in hospital, the total number of people in hospital remained fairly steady.

Emergency department admissions testing positive remain highest at Middlemore, but they had fallen from 40 percent last month to 28 percent now. Auckland Hospital was down from 30 percent to 22 percent, while Waitematā was steady about 18 percent.

Whangārei’s ED positivity rate was still increasing, he said.

“Admissions in the rest of the country are growing and we will continue to see them grow.”

Dr Bloomfield said hospitalisation rates during the delta outbreak was about 8 percent, whereas the omicron outbreak had been about 0.9 percent.

“That hospitalisation rate will appear to increase over coming weeks, because as the cases drop yet people remain in hospital we’ll see the denominator decline much quicker … hospitalisations will decline but more slowly,” he said.

“The number of deaths each day is also likely to increase and will take longer to decline.”

He said staffing shortages were a major pressure on the health system, and there was real pressure in hospitals as well as care in the community, including rest homes.

‘Covid isn’t done with the world just yet’
Dr Bloomfield said New Zealand could expect ongoing waves of covid, and looking across the Tasman was instructive.

“The number of people hospitalised with covid in New South Wales never dropped below 950 after their first omicron wave … it’s now back over 1000 as cases started to increase again.

“In contrast, in Victoria the number of hospitalisations declined down to around 200 and remained steady there … so two quite different pictures.”

He said this showed New Zealand should expect to see a residual number of cases and people in hospital.

The UK had seen increased case numbers with the BA.2 subvariant, with Scotland hit hardest.

“Case numbers there are just below their previous peak, and hospitalisation figures the highest they have been since 2020. Globally it’s likely there will continue to be further waves of omicron and likewise there will be new variants of concern.”

He said New Zealand would face these just as other countries would.

“Covid isn’t done with the world just yet.”

Looking ahead
Tomorrow the government is due to announce if it will relax mandates, vaccine passes and the traffic light system as the omicron outbreak passes its peak in Auckland. Cabinet discussed reducing the restrictions yesterday.

Ahead of the announcement, Dr Bloomfield said New Zealand was still in the middle of a global pandemic which had thrown curveballs before and would continue to.

“We need to be prepared to redeploy the measures that we already have in place or have used in the past.”

He said there was a balance between protecting the population — particularly vulnerable groups — and only using restrictions for the extent they were needed.

At the moment, total ICU and HDU beds were about 60 percent occupied, he said. Each day hospitals were looking at the number of beds available and staffing those accordingly.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The clamour in New Zealand to ditch vaccine passes and change the traffic light setting is poorly timed, an epidemiologist says.

The number of covid-19 deaths is on the rise, with nine reported today.

One thousand people are now in hospital, including 26 in ICU, the highest number yet in intensive care.

University of Auckland epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson said the worst may be yet to come.

It is “too soon to relax”, although the country is nearing its peak, Professor Jackson said.

He said the push for change is “politicking” and not many businesses want to remove vaccine passes at present.

He told RNZ Morning Report that looking around the world other countries did not go straight up and down with their peaks and New Zealand would be at risk of “yo-yoing around” if vaccine passes and other public health interventions were removed too soon.

Vaccine passes should be retained until it was clear that the omicron outbreak was just about over, he said.

‘We’re at the top’
“We’re at the top at the moment. It makes absolutely no sense to remove any effective public health measures when we’re still at the top.

“It’s crazy. I think it’s political nonsense to be pushing to take them away now.”

Professor Jackson said more than 1 million New Zealanders still needed to get their booster. As well, the unvaccinated were twice as likely to catch covid-19, three times as likely to transmit it than fully boosted people and five times more likely to be in hospital.

“We’re not over it yet … those relatively small numbers of people, when you do all of those multiplications, they are sufficient to overwhelm our health system.”

He referred to what was happening in the UK and parts of Australia where there were rising case numbers.

“I know there’s huge pressure to take away the vaccine passes but I think it’s a mistake.”

Professor Jackson said it was business which forced the government to introduce vaccine mandates and he did not believe they were hugely in favour of taking them away now.

“I think this is politicking.”

Makes no sense
It did not make sense to change the traffic light setting in the next few days either.

“We’ve got more people in hospital today than we’ve ever had. We’ve got more deaths than we’ve ever had.

“It just doesn’t make any sense to be relaxing public health measures that have proven to be incredibly effective at the peak of an outbreak.”

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report that the traffic light system must be “no more restrictive” than needed and mandates would not be as necessary after the first omicron wave.

Cabinet was meeting today to review vaccine mandates, vaccine passports and the traffic light system, though any decisions will not be announced until Wednesday.

Watch the PM talking to Morning Report

The changes will mark the biggest domestic shake up to covid-19 restrictions since omicron arrived on Aotearoa’s shores.

“We know that in the future we’re likely to have have additional waves of omicron… We’re already seeing that in other countries,” Ardern said.

“So let’s make sure we get the covid protection framework, that traffic light system, right for the future.

“We want it to be no more restrictive than it needs to be, so if there are areas we can pare it back, we will.”

She said that with a highly vaccinated population the government believed mandates and vaccine passes would no longer be as necessary once the omicron outbreak had peaked.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

It is too early to say New Zealand has peaked, and declining tallies are no reason to celebrate as covid-19 is still rife in our communities with a record eight deaths reported in a day, an epidemiologist says.

University of Auckland professor Rod Jackson said the coronavirus is occurring so frequently right now that anyone with covid-like symptoms can assume they have virus, unless they get a negative PCR test.

The reported cases are thought to be a fraction of the actual cases out there in the community, he said.

In the past three days, 22 people with covid-19 have died – nearly a 5th of the country’s total death toll of 113 since the virus arrived in New Zealand more than two years ago.

And while the number of people dying with the virus is a small percentage of those who test positive, the huge volume of people catching the virus at the moment means experts have warned there will be increasing deaths over the coming weeks.

So, early celebrations about a dip in case numbers are both premature, and rely on an incomplete picture of what is actually happening.

Yesterday was the fifth day in a row the Ministry of Health said recorded case numbers had declined, with 14,494 new covid-19 cases reported on Saturday, and the total number of infections dropping by 9000 to 197,251 people currently infected.

Dip marked for Auckland
The dip was especially marked for Auckland, which on March 8 reported 10,000 cases, but was down to 4509 yesterday.

Professor Jackson said from the data available, he could not tell if New Zealand and Auckland’s case numbers had peaked, or not.

“The cases can go up and down from day to day. The most important thing for all the people to realise is that we’re only reporting a quarter or a third of all the cases. So, if you’ve got 20,000 cases reported — there could be 40,000 to 60,000.

“I think it’s too early to call. I’d love to believe it’s on the decline in Auckland, it’s clearly still going up elsewhere, but I just don’t think we have any clear idea — we’re shooting in the dark because people are either not getting tested, or if they’re getting tested many of them are not reported, and the rate at which we report could change over time.

“So it is possible that in Auckland we’re still going up.”

Professor Jackson points out covid-19 tends to run in ongoing waves, and since the start of the pandemic there had been ongoing waves throughout countries that had battled it around the world.

“We’re seeing it not just in NSW, we’re seeing it in most of Europe as well, we’re just beginning to see the numbers climb again.”

‘Too many restrictions lifted’
“I think governments have taken too many restrictions off too early. I think we’re going to see more waves of omicron — hopefully not as bad, but I’d strongly recommend that we keep some of the basic restrictions in place, the ones that are not too disruptive.

“Certainly masks in public places, certainly people should make an effort to keep their distance.”

It is vital that everyone who qualifies for a booster vaccine goes and gets one, he said.

“It’s by far the most important thing anyone can do – make sure they’re vaxxed to the max. Make sure you’re ready for it, you’re fully immunised.”

University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker, told RNZ First Up today that protecting the older and more vulnerable parts of the community from exposure to the virus was important, to try to prevent deaths.

About a million people have been slow getting their booster, he said, but the difference in immunity for those who had it could be lifesaving.

“We know that hospitalisations lag about seven to 10 days after the rise of cases, but unfortunately deaths lag even longer, three to four weeks, so we haven’t seen the peak of deaths yet.

10 to 20 deaths a day
“This may rise into that range of 10 to 20 deaths a day for several days, based on international experience.”

Professor Baker does believe there is rising evidence to say New Zealand’s case numbers may have peaked, with Auckland peaking about nine days ago, and the rest of the country about five days ago.

But he said it will take four to six weeks to flatten the high case numbers down.

“Remarkably, yesterday was the first day in six weeks where we saw a drop in cases in every DHB across New Zealand. Obviously you need a few more days to be sure that’s a pattern, but that’s looking positive.”

He said the figures could still sit around 5000 new cases a day for months.

Yesterday, Canterbury University epidemic modeller Professor Michael Plank told RNZ there were strong signs that Auckland’s case numbers have peaked.

Areas close to Auckland like Hamilton and Tauranga would not be too close behind, but the rest of the country was likely about a week and a half behind, he said.

Settling of numbers needed
Microbiologist Dr Siouxsie Wiles said there needed to be a settling of the numbers before it could be declared that Auckland had peaked. But she was worried about what is happening in Europe.

“They had a wave and it dropped quite quickly and now it’s rising again.

“We’re obviously going into winter and that really concerns me because as well as having covid, we’re also soon opening our borders, so we’re going to have more things like influenza coming in, so it could be a very difficult winter ahead and I think people really need to be preparing themselves for that,” she said.

“The other thing we have to remember is a lot of people who have been infected in this wave in New Zealand have been younger people, so if it moves from younger people into older age groups then we’re much more likely to see an increase in deaths.”

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Epidemiologist Sir David Skegg, who along with his team has been providing advice to the New Zealand government on the covid-19 response, says more border restrictions may ease soon, as the opposition National Party calls for all visitors to be allowed into the country.

Yesterday, the government announced that from 11.59pm on Wednesday, vaccinated New Zealanders returning to the country and who test negative on pre-departure will no longer have to self-isolate on arrival.

The move brings forward step two of the phased reopening of the border, but the National Party says that does not go far enough and is calling for the border to be open to all visitors, to jump-start the tourism industry.

The government relied on urgent advice from the Strategic Covid-19 Public Health Advisory Group — chaired by Sir David — before making the changes.

Sir David told Morning Report the next few weeks were expected to be very challenging on the health system as the peak of the omicron outbreak evolves, so it was best to wait until then before making decisions about opening to tourists.

“We still don’t know where it’s going to end. The number of people going into hospital every day is increasing, so I’m not surprised that they’re [the government] just going to take a bit of time to decide about that, but I expect that tourists will be welcome to New Zealand earlier than we expected,” he said.

“And it’s funny everyone calls for certainty, but actually this is a case where the uncertainty has been beneficial to those interests because the dates are coming forward.”

Tourism industry planning
However, National Party Covid-19 response spokesperson Chris Bishop told Morning Report that the tourism industry needed that certainty from now to plan ahead.

“If you talk to people involved in the tourism industry, they are literally borrowing money on their credit cards, mortgaging their houses to try and get through. And so what we can do for them is reconnect New Zealand to the world, open those borders, and allow tourists to come here,” he said.

“You’re probably not going to see a massive influx of tourists straight away in the next two to three, four weeks, you know, airlines have got to put flights on.

“But it is really important that we send signal to the airlines and to the airport that tourists are going to come and they’re going to come soon because airlines are making those bookings for the next few months and the next year right now so they do need some certainty, they do need that time frame.”

Bishop said while there would be some risk in such a decision, it was about considering the “relative risk”.

“The relative risk of allowing people who are vaccinated, who have passed the pre-departure test, to arrive into New Zealand, going into a country with one of the highest reproduction rates in the world right now and with 15,000 covid cases per day, the relative risk is much lower.

“But you’ve also got to weigh that up against the incredibly tough circumstances that our tourist parts of the economy have been in over the last two years.”

‘Minimal effect’ on NZ
On the other hand, Bishop said yesterday’s announcement was undoubtedly good news for the grounded New Zealanders who would be excited to once again be able to see their friends and whānau here.

Sir David said the changes announced yesterday would only have a “minimal effect” on New Zealand’s situation.

“The impact of this on the progress of our epidemic in New Zealand will be very small, really quite slight. The fact is that we’ve got thousands of new cases occurring every day … the number of people turning up at the airport who are infected at the moment it’s an average of about 10 a day.

“That number will go up, of course, with more people coming into New Zealand, but it will have a minimal effect on our epidemic.”

The government has asked the advisory group to now review the role of vaccine passes and mandates for the future.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Epidemiologist Professor Rod Jackson is urging New Zealanders to take omicron seriously, and certainly not to think of it as similar to the flu.

The warning comes as new modelling shows omicron could peak by mid next month with about 4000 daily cases.

Professor Jackson, professor of epidemiology at Auckland University, told RNZ Morning Report there was “no doubt” New Zealanders were not taking omicron seriously.

“The standard thing I hear these days is, ‘Oh, this is just a mild condition, it’s like a mild flu’ — and it’s just not true,” he said.

“In the [United] States, for example, more people have died from omicron, than died from delta. It’s also worth noting that I mean if you ever had a bad flu, you feel like you want to die.

“It’s not a particularly good comparison. The flu kills 500 people a year. Normally that’s almost double the road crash death rate. It’s about the same as suicide, just a bit less.

“This is a serious disease that people need to take seriously.”

High omicron death rate
The high omicron death rate in the US was because the variant was so contagious, Dr Jackson said.

“It spreads like wildfire, and I guess that’s the other important issue when we’re thinking about the comparison between the flu and and Omicron is that the R value, the number of people that one infected person with the flu is going to infect, is less than two.

“With omicron, we don’t even know how big it is. It’s certainly much bigger than delta, which was about six (people infected per person), so this is a very different disease from the flu and we need to take it seriously.

“We need to go out and get maximally vaccinated.”

On that point, Dr Jackson said there were a likely a lot of reasons more people had not got a booster shot.

“One is, we’re all a little over it, aren’t we? Everyone is tired. Everyone wants to go back to normal.

“Secondly there is this general view is that I hear — ‘Oh, but isn’t omicron, you know, just like a cold?’

‘People die of this’
“For some people, it’s very mild. For some people it’s asymptomatic, but people die of this.

“Look at the hospital rates. Every New Zealander should have a look at the graph of the number of hospitalisations, and if you look at it in the last week or two, it’s going almost vertically.

“There’s a couple of things we really need to do – get maximally vaccinated and wear a good mask.”

Today the Ministry of Health confirmed 3297 new cases of covid-19 in the community in New Zealand, with 179 people in hospital with the coronavirus, including one in intensive care.

There were also eight new cases in managed isolation today.

Yesterday the Ministry of Health reported 2846 covid-19 cases in the community and 143 people in hospital with the virus.

There have now been 38,951  cases of covid-19 in New Zealand.

Police Commissioner Andrew Coster said that police staff working at the anti-mandate protest outside Parliament had contracted covid-19.

He said while they could not link transmission to the protest, with people coming far and wide for the demonstration, he would be surprised if there was no covid among protesters.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the omicron outbreak is likely to peak in Aotearoa New Zealand in three to six weeks.

At that point, she says, the country will move down the traffic light settings, easing off gathering limits.

“We are predicting cases will continue to double every three to four days … it’s likely then that very soon we will all know people who have covid, or we will potentially get it ourselves,” Ardern says.

She says there are three reasons that is no longer as scary a prospect as it used to be.

“Firstly, we are highly vaccinated, and that happened before omicron set in.”

Secondly she said that meant omicron would be a mild to moderate illness, and boosters made hospitalisation 10 times less likely.

Third, public health measures like masks, gathering limits and vaccine passes were helping slow down the spread to ensure everyone who needed a hospital bed can get it.

The plan is working
“So far, that plan is working. We have 46 cases per 100,000 people, compared to 367 in New South Wales and 664 in Victoria at the same point in the outbreak. Our hospitalisations too are well below Australian states at a similar time.”

Ardern said cases were likely to peak in mid- to late March, some three to six weeks away.

At that point a rapid decline, followed by cases stabilising at a lower level was likely.

Ardern said at that point the traffic light system could change, because it meant public health measures used to protect the health system could be eased off.

She said vaccine passes had been necessary as the “least bad option” but they had always been temporary.

After we come through a wave and a peak of omicron, many unvaccinated people would have been exposed to covid-19.

She says coming through the peak would allow the government to ease mandates in places where they were less likely to impact on vulnerable people.

“They will remain important in some areas though, for some time.”

Beyond omicron … the easing of covid restrictions. Video: RNZ News

Mandates to remain in some areas
Mandates were likely to remain for some areas — particularly sections of the healthcare workforce — but there would be a narrowing of where they were required, she said.

She said it was hard to set a date, but the government needed to ensure the country was  “well beyond the peak” and that the pressure on the health system was manageable.

She said the reasons not to do away with the traffic light system entirely was so the country was prepared for new variants and potential future waves, and the coming of winter at the same time as flu returns.

“To summarise then, the coming weeks. Covid will increase, and rapidly. There will be disruption and pressure from omicron. We must brace through the next six weeks, but we can do so knowing the future with fewer restrictions is near because that has always been the course we have chartered,” Ardern said.

She said that as the country reached the peak and started to come down New Zealanders could all move towards a “new normal” they can all live with.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson has outlined new financial supports to help businesses impacted by the red settings.

High daily cases continue
Daily covid-19 cases continued to increase dramatically over the weekend, reaching a new high of 2522 on Sunday — with two new deaths — and remaining above 2300 today.

The high case load has also led to an increase in related hospitalisations, putting strain on the health system which is already seeing some patients spending up to 36 hours in emergency departments, often waiting for hours in corridors.

In a statement, the Ministry of Health said there had also been two covid-19 related deaths as well as 2365 new community cases.

“Sadly, we are today reporting the death of a patient at Middlemore Hospital.”

A patient in their 70s at Auckland City Hospital also died following a diagnosis of Covid-19, the ministry said.

“Our thoughts and condolences are with both patients’ family and friends.”

There are 116 people in hospital today – one in Northland, 20 in North Shore, 34 in Middlemore, 47 in Auckland, one in Tauranga, 12 in Waikato and one in Tairāwhiti.

There is one case in ICU or HDU.

The average age of the current hospitalisations is 58.

Ardern’s message to protesters
Ardern said she had a final message for those occupying the lawns of Parliament: “Everyone is over covid. No one wants to live with rules or restrictions, but had we not been willing to work together to protect one another then we would have all been worse off as individuals, including losing people we love.

“That hasn’t happened here for the most part and that is a fact worth celebrating, rather than protesting.

“We all want to go back to the way life was, and we will, I suspect sooner than you think. But when that happens it will be because easing restrictions won’t compromise the life of thousands of people — not because you demand it.

“Now is not the time to dismantle our hard work and preparation, to remove our armour just as the battle begins.”

Ardern said she still had confidence in the police commissioner and “the enormous job” he and all police did every day, including on the forecourt of Parliament right now.

Asked when protesters would be gone, she said enforcement of the law was a decision that lay with police, she said.

She said her speech today was “absolutely not” in response to the demands of the protesters.

‘Bullying’ and ‘harassment’
She said the protesters had been engaging in illegal activity that bordered on and demonstrated “bullying” and “harassment” of Wellingtonians, and she found the opposition calls for more details on lowering restrictions “quite upsetting to see they now seem to be responding and sympathising with the protesters”.

She said no one should have to put up with having human waste thrown at them, as police say happened this morning.

This morning she again urged protesters at Parliament to go home.

Police early today moved to contain the convoy protest — which has now been at Parliament for two weeks — by installing concrete barriers to prevent more vehicles from entering the area.

A researcher today warned that the continued presence of far-right elements among the protesters risked greater radicalisation, and possible violence.

Ardern has maintained there will be no engagement with the protesters, and although ACT leader David Seymour spoke to some of their representatives last week, all parties have since signed a letter from the Speaker saying there would be no dialogue from politicians until disruptive and threatening behaviour was brought to an end.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz