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

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

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