Covid-19

Covid-19: All of NZ to move to orange setting from 11.59pm tonight

Published

5 years ago

April 13, 2022

Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins has confirmed the entire country will drop from red to the orange traffic light setting from 11.59 pm tonight, saying the “overall picture is a very positive one”.

Hipkins said the change in alert levels was justified for several reasons, including an ongoing decline in cases.

He said it had been three weeks since the most recent simplification to the traffic light system, and despite the “significant relaxation of the settings, we’ve continued to see positive improvements in the overall trajectory”.

He said case numbers now sit below 10,000 new cases per day for the first time since 24 February, and that hospitalisations in Auckland were lower, with all three DHBs each reporting fewer than 100 patients for the first time since late February.

Planned care delivery is also increasing day by day, and deaths were also decreasing, from a seven-day rolling average of 20 a week ago, to 13 now.

“The overall picture is a very positive one.”

The change ot the orange traffic light setting means there are no indoor or outdoor capacity limits and no seated and separated rules.

Face masks remain an important protection and are encouraged, but are largely no longer required.

They are still required at some gatherings and events, close-proximity businesses like hairdressers and food-and-drink businesses. Hipkins said masks are still required on public transport and flights.

Masks are also no longer required in schools, though they are again still encouraged. The ministry is providing further advice to schools about increasing ventilation.

Hipkins said mask requirements in schools will no longer be justified in all cases, some will have high rates of vaccination or immunity through having had Covid-19, and others might not be experiencing outbreaks at all, so it “does move to a more localised response from schools”.

He says Cabinet “absolutely” considered the possibility of requirements for mask use in schools.

“Ultimately looking at a school by school basis, in some schools there is still a very strong justification for masks – but not all.

“It is very challenging for schools, it has proven to be one of the most challenging Covid-19 requirements.”

He said schools have been provided with guidance, and they have access to public health guidance so they can consider the advice for themselves.

Hipkins urged the roughly 1 million New Zealanders who have not yet got booster shots to do so, saying New Zealand fared much better than many other countries because of high levels of vaccination.

He said the only question in considering settings was over whether the move to orange would be tonight or tomorrow, and ultimately the evidence was very in favour of moving to orange.

Hipkins said the traffic light system may be used in response to a combination of Covid-19 and influenza.

It was hard to say exactly how many people in New Zealand have had Covid-19, but it “could be significantly more than the official statistics are showing”.

“It could be around the two million marker by now … the modelling suggests the outer limits would be sort of in that 1.75 to 2 million range at the upper end. It may be less than that.”

He said the government has had regular feedback on how the outbreak is affecting Māori and Pacific communities, though they were not specifically consulted with on today’s traffic light decision.

“The word consultation in a public sector sense has a particular type of meaning and we haven’t run formal consultation processes around alert level decisions or around decisions about where we sit on the Covid Protection Framework.

“The time constraints around that certainly would make that very difficult … that’s not to say though that we haven’t received feedback and we haven’t taken that feedback on board. We absolutely have.”

The next review of the traffic light settings will be in mid-May.

Source : 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