Covid-19

ACT leader David Seymour calls elimination strategy into question

Published

5 years ago

September 13, 2021

With community cases rising again today, ACT leader David Seymour says the government must consider a suppression strategy that finds a middle ground between health and financial stability.

Act leader David Seymour Photo: RNZ / Rob Dixon

Cabinet decided this afternoon to keep Auckland in level 4 for at least one more week, and the rest of New Zealand to remain in level 2.

New community cases spiked over the weekend from 11 on Friday to 23 on Saturday and 20 yesterday.

With confirmation of 33 new cases today, ACT leader David Seymour said the government needed to consider what kind of strategy would be financially sustainable for businesses, and how long the current strategy could be continued before high vaccination rates meant lockdowns were no longer needed.

“There may not be easy answers but clearly we’ve had a strategy that has worked somewhat, and has run out of runway. We now need to consider what a new strategy would look like,” he said.

“There has to be an interim strategy while we wait for vaccination levels to be high enough that allows businesses to keep operating sustainably.

“If we can’t get this outbreak under control with four weeks of level four are we certain it’ll be under control after five? And if we can’t get it under control after five weeks are we gonna go to six? People will go broke in the meantime.”

He said he hoped he was wrong and level 4 would work.

“But every piece of evidence is that it’s not working and if that’s the case then we need to start looking at other options.

“I can tell you when the Takapuna Business Association says we’re 96 percent down that’s when you get huge trouble, it’s causing mental health trouble, it’s causing financial trouble.

He said switching to a strategy of suppression in Auckland, with a hard border to prevent the virus spreading to other regions, could be an alternative.

“It may be worth saving the rest of the country while keeping Auckland at a level of restriction that allows businesses in Auckland to do business while we wait for vaccination rates to be high enough. That is still at least two months away in the best case scenario, and we can’t go with Auckland at level 4 or even conventional level 3 through that.

“If we have to go to level 4 for another week and another week then what we’re doing is the worst of all worlds. We’re not eliminating Covid-19 from Auckland and we’re not allowing the bounceback that businesses need to recover either.”

He said in the meantime the government needed to be offering more resurgence and wage subsidy payments to businesses to keep them running.

“It is simply not good enough that the government has spent over $50 billion on Covid recovery but less than a third of that has actually been on direct support for businesses affected by the restrictions the government itself put in place.”

He also called for more testing and new testing technologies.

“Five thousand tests in Auckland yesterday, not good enough, we need new technology. We need to be rolling out saliva testing en masse because at the moment we’re finding these unexpected cases showing up that go to Middlemore for no other reason.

“Statistically it’s more likely that they’re the tip of an iceberg and we’re not testing enough to know. Uncertainty due to a lack of testing is fatal to businesses that must continue with restrictions because the prime minister always wants to play safe.”

“The goal will be to keep it suppressed to the point where it doesn’t overwhelm the hospital system and that’s going to require massive changes in testing and tracing. The government should immediately remove the ban on self rapid testing. They should be mailing them out by the thousand to any suburb where they have cases so that you can find the cases rapidly.

“At the moment the government doesn’t even have these options on the table. It is lockdown and go broke, or open up completely. Neither of those is sustainable or palatable.

“The problem is when there’s uncertainty the prime minister errs on the side of caution about public health but carelessness about every other aspect of New Zealanders’ welfare. That’s why we need more testing and more certainty.”

-RNZ

Covid-19

Covid-19 update: 8544 new cases, 39 further deaths linked to virus

Published

3 years ago

June 19, 2023

News Staff

There were 8544 new cases of Covid-19 reported in Aotearoa in the week to midnight on Sunday, and a further 39 deaths attributed to the virus.

The total number of deaths attributed to the virus in New Zealand is now 3077.

In addition, there were 246 cases in hospital at midnight on Sunday with six in intensive care.

The seven-day rolling average of cases was 1217.

Last week, 9883 new Covid-19 cases were reported and a further 37 deaths were attributed to the virus.

Source: RNZ

Covid-19

Dr Jonathan Howard: why US doctors spread Covid disinformation

Published

3 years ago

May 21, 2023

News Staff

An American doctor believes more than 800,000 Americans would be alive today, if the US had taken New Zealand’s Covid approach.

Jonathan Howard, who is the chief of neurology at Bellevue Hospital in New York, said he was angry that influential health professionals minimised the seriousness of the virus.

“We want them infected,” was the call of then presidential science adviser Paul Alexander.

It’s also the title of Howard’s new book, which tells the story of how some medical and public health professionals came to become anti-vaccine and pro herd immunity.

He told Kim Hill on Saturday Morning there was a deluge of mis-information from prominent US doctors, some of whom wanted to actually spread the virus.

“Famous doctors from our top universities went on television and told people that Covid was just going away, that it was just the flu, that young people under the age of 65 have essentially no risk,” he said.

“And not only were there not attempts to limit the virus, these were loud influential voices who wanted to spread it.

“You can read quotes from our former Covid advisor, Donald Trump’s former Covid advisor, celebrating rising cases, saying this is a good thing when cases rise, which is shocking and astonishing.”

While Howard said there were obvious differences between the two countries, many lives could have been saved if the US had taken a similar approach to New Zealand.

“If we had limited infections until we had vaccinated the vast majority of our population, we would have potentially had hundreds of thousands of people still alive today, there’s no question about that.”

However, our zero-Covid strategy wasn’t without its critics, with Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya writing that it had “cost New Zealand dearly”.

“I think that the fact that most of your grandparents are still alive means that zero Covid did not cost you dearly,” Howard said in response.

“I don’t discount that, there were real costs of the lockdowns, I don’t know anyone who argues otherwise and I want to be very clear that I was protected from those costs, meaning I am very fortunate to be employed, I worked throughout the pandemic, I was never lonely, I don’t have my own business.”

But Howard said he didn’t think that the alternative – letting the virus spread freely – would have yielded a better outcome.

He said that when forklifts were needed to move bodies into giant refrigerated trucks in New York, it was fantasy to imagine the city could have operated as normal during the pandemic.

“You talk about deferred healthcare – every single healthcare worker was working with Covid patients, our hospitals were overflowing,” he said.

“So when I hear people lament they missed cancer screenings, who would have done those screenings? Would elderly patients have left their house to go to crowded waiting rooms to get a mammogram for example? I don’t think so.

“I think that the fantasy is that things could have just been normal if only if it hadn’t been for overly cautious politicians.”

By comparison, New Zealand did well, Howard said.

“I look at the numbers, I look at your death rate with great jealousy.” he said.

“And I think for long periods of time your economy was more open than ours was because we had to keep locking down, just because there were overwhelming outbreaks of the virus.”

Howard said the fact many older New Zealanders were still alive compared with the US statistics, showed the success of this country’s Covid strategy.

Source RNZ