Covid Watch

ExportNZ says Zespri kiwifruit that tested positive for Covid-19 was likely infected in China.
The positive result came during routine sample testing by Chinese officials, but all further tests have since come back negative.
The fruit was packed in the Bay of Plenty in May and shipped from Tauranga in August, where there was no Covid-19 community transmission.
It was also disinfected and tested on arrival in China.
ExportNZ executive director Catherine Beard told Heather du Plessis-Allan it sounds like it came from somewhere in the distribution channel.
“Probably someone who had Covid has coughed on some fruit or something, because it sounds like it was quite a small sample as well.”
LISTEN ABOVE

There’s been a lot of coverage today about the poor state of our health system.
And the fact that we simply don’t have enough ICU capacity to cope with the kinds of Covid outbreaks we will eventually have to deal with once it properly takes hold in the community. 
If you’re worried about the health system, and I am, then get a jab.
This is the single biggest reason why you should get a jab if you haven’t yet because you do not want to end up needing medical attention for Covid when there’s an outbreak on and the hospitals are overrun.
And they will be overrun.
We saw what happened when we only had about 700 Covid cases mostly in Auckland.
That’s a tiny outbreak.
That’s what Victoria’s recording in a day now.
That outbreak put only about 40 people in hospital at any one time but even that stretched Auckland’s hospital system so badly that nurses from other regions had to come in and help.
That should give you an idea of how stretched our health system is.
Of course, none of this actually surprises any of us, right? 
We already know we have the second-lowest number of ICU beds in the developed world.
Only Mexico is worse than us.
We already know we’re losing nurses to Australia because we pay them too little.
We already know migrant doctors are moving back home because Kris Faafoi refuses to give them residency.
We already know we can’t get more nurses into the country because they’re not apparently considered skilled enough as migrants. 
We know rest homes are short on nurses, we know DHBs are short on nurses. 
We know the health system was underfunded by the previous National government because Labour told us that in the 2017 election campaign, and we also know Labour done bugger all to repair it.
We know the government has been warned, begged, urged, hassled to get our health system ready.
And yet here we are.
I wonder if this is one of those case examples of a “slow motion train smash” that Rob Fyfe talked to Mike Hosking about earlier this week.
We can all see what’s going wrong, but we can’t do anything to stop it because we are not in charge.  
Labour is. 
So we can only sit here and watch it slowly unfold to an inevitable end.
The only thing you and I have the power to do is get our jabs and try to keep ourselves out of those hospitals during the outbreak.

A Sydney intensive care specialist says Delta is like a wave, and you want to decrease the size of it.  
Mark Nicholls told Mike Hosking the way to reduce the number of people in the wave is to vaccinate, and to get people to follow public health rules. 
"By decreasing the wave, decreasing the size of it. You don't have a system where you have too many patients coming to hospital, and too many to meet the ICU capacity that you have." 
LISTEN ABOVE

Now we've accepted we're going to have to learn to live with Covid-19, can we please have a clear plan? 
Listening to the PM and Chris Hipkins and the good Doctor this week, I sense they realise this last lockdown needs to be just that, the last lockdown. 
We were scared at the beginning, and we've been cowed into compliance over the past couple of years. 
But I sense now that New Zealanders, Aucklanders for one set of reasons, South Islanders for another set of reasons, are over it. 
Another lockdown would be the death knell for a lot of businesses and a lot of jobs. 
And compliance won't come so easily; just look at Melbourne to see what happens when enough people get riled up by enough false information. 
Right now, we're getting the platitudes and the patronising talk on vaccinations. 
But there's no target and no plan for what happens once the rush to get jabbed becomes a trickle. 
We may already be near peak vaccine coverage. 
So, we need a plan, because we're going to have to live with this. 
Some people will get sick, some vaccinated people will get sick and some of us will die. 
The Government's job now is to work out and then explain how we're going to keep those numbers as small as possible. 
To make a plan. 
A plan to get managed isolation for returning New Zealanders and eventually, dare I say it, visitors out of our cities. 
These need to be permanent facilities, not the expensive make-shift and frankly unsafe arrangements we have now. 
We need a plan for treating the inevitable ongoing cases. 
We need a plan to tackle the debt we've accumulated. 
And we need to get back to proper scrutiny and challenging of what the Government's up to behind the scenes, while we're all obsessed with Covid. 
When you think about it, this kind of planning is what a decent opposition would be working on right now, if it was serious about winning the next election. 
So maybe what we need, as a country, is just that. 
A decent opposition, with a plan.

Retail chain Farmers has told Auckland office staff to go back to the office in Level Three, or be reduced to 80 percent pay.  
At the same time, the Government line is that if people can work from home at Level Three, they should. 
First Union organiser Ben Peterson joined Tim Dower. 
LISTEN ABOVE 

The debate over Covid modelling continues. 
New modelling, backed by the Government, suggests at 80 per cent vaccination, there would be seven-thousand deaths and 60-thousand-hospitalisations in a year without restrictions.  
Covid-19 modeller Rodney Jones says the modelling isn't in line with what's happened in other countries. 
But Auckland University epidemiologist and data scientist Janine Paynter told Mike Hosking there are dangers in basing modelling on other countries. 
"The health systems are very different; the way people respond to different messages about what to do is different." 
LISTEN ABOVE

People are losing out on money paid for holiday accommodation they can't use in lockdown. 
Consumer New Zealand has been receiving up to 15 Covid-19 related accommodation complaints a week during Alert Levels Three and Four. 
Many are from people who can't get refunds for booked accommodation. 
Spokesperson Gemma Rasmussen told Tim Dower people should check the terms and conditions.  
"When you look at policies, for example Airbnb, the cancellation policies are really variable, and ultimately you as a consumer are signing up to this." 
LISTEN ABOVE

Closed borders are making it difficult for our hospitals to bring on internationally sought-after nurses to increase ICU capacity. 
Some critical care nurses who are already in New Zealand on visas, are also leaving for much higher paid jobs in Australia. 
The Government has increased funding and purchased more equipment, but a shortage of highly-trained nurses is preventing day-to-day ICU capacity from being increased. 
College of Intensive Care Medicine Chair Andrew Stapleton told Mike Hosking it's incredibly frustrating. 
"They’re currently not even on the critical skills shortage list, which I don't understand. bringing them here is difficult, their partners can't come easily.” 
LISTEN ABOVE

A former Government virus modeller claims the latest official forecast of possible Covid deaths is overcooked.
Te Punaha Matatini research suggests 7000 people would die of Covid in a year, with an 80% vaccination rate.
Its modelling suggests having 90% vaccine coverage of everyone five and older would see about 500 hospitalisations, and 50 deaths annually.
But Wigram Capital modeller Rodney Jones says that's not plausible.
He says we're always going to have some restrictions and rapid tests and people will behave.
But Te Punaha Matatini Professor Sean Hendy insists the figures are a dose of realism.
He says with 80% of the eligible population over five vaccinated, one-million would still be unvaccinated, and Delta's much worse than the virus we dealt with last year.
LISTEN ABOVE

I don’t even want to start guessing why the PM released that doomsday model this afternoon.  
But whatever her motivations, I am not in the slightest convinced by the numbers.   
According to the model – designed by Shaun Hendy – even if we get 80% of us vaccinated, we will still see 7000 deaths a year from covid.   
That’s 135 a week.   
That will scare the living day lights out of some people.   
But it’s not in the slightest plausible.   
Do you know how you know that?   
Look at what’s happening in real life.   
You don’t need a model… you can just look at Singapore.    
Same population size as NZ, vaccination rate over that 80% mark now, not seeing 7000 deaths a year.   
They’ve had 16 in the last month.   
According to Hendy's model they should’ve recorded 540 in the last month alone.   
I could run you through any number of countries with high vax rates that are not recording anything like the level of deaths that Hendy is predicting.   
in fact, even if you wanted to ignore real life and stick to comparisons between models, take a look at what the models across the Tasman are predicting and you’ll find Hendy an alarmist. 
One is predicting 26 deaths a year across Australia.  
Even the worst-case scenarios I can find come nowhere near the predictions Hendy's making.   
As I say I don’t know the motivation for putting this extremely questionable number out there.  
If it was to scare people into embracing this lockdown or embracing closed borders, I’m disappointed.   
Right now, we need hope, not fear. 
And if fear was the motivation, I hope to God it doesn’t work.