Covid Watch

Government minister Stuart Nash is so confident that 90 per cent of New Zealanders will be vaccinated by Christmas that he's even bet a case of award-winning wine on it. 
During an interview on NewstalkZB, Labour MP Nash bet senior National MP Mark Mitchell a case of Hawke's Bay's Craggy Range wine on 90 per cent of New Zealanders being vaccinated by the end of the year. 
The Economic and Regional Development Minister told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking that with only 26 deaths from Covid New Zealand was a world leader and he was confident it could also lead on vaccinations too. 
But it could end up being a costly bet for the Labour MP. The cheapest bottle of wine on Craggy Range's website costing about $26.95 and the most expensive about $150. The vineyard is in his Napier electorate. 
So far just 45 per cent of the population has had one dose of the vaccination and 24 per cent have had both doses. 
The Government has committed to providing enough vaccines for every New Zealander by the end of the year. It is in confidential negotiations with other countries to get hold of more Pfizer vaccines sooner than October when a large shipment is due. 
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Today is the day, of sorts. As of today, if you want to book your vaccine, you can. September 1, it's open to everyone. 
Important to reiterate, especially given the spin the Prime Minister has put on the whole process, a booking is not a vaccine. The sad reality for many who will be allowed to book as of today is that you might find that getting a spot this month is hard work, if not impossible. 
That is because, as well as starting this thing scandalously late, we didn't organise it properly to roll out in a consistent and rapid way. As the past couple of days have demonstrated, the rollout is now having to be tightened up because we will literally run out of stock before the next lot arrives. 
Unless, of course, and I think we got the clue from Chris Hipkins yesterday, they drum up new supplies. At which point surely, we ask, why did you leave it till we got ourselves in a mess to actually do what you should have from the start? That is go hard and go early. 
Anyway, one of the more important bits of all of this is, how many will book? What percentage of us are actually going to get jabbed? This is the first time reality will be measured. All very well having a poll of the keen and not so keen, but what we will learn in the next week or so is our real time percentage of the vaxxers. 
We've now reaced the time at which supply is no longer the marker, but demand is. My guess is it will be no higher than any other western country, somewhere between 65 and 75 percent. What are we going to do then? Because it's at that point all the theorists who didn’t want a target or an incentive are going to be shown as being ever so slightly out of step or touch with the rest of the world. 
The conversation we should have had will need to be conducted. At what point do the borders open? 70 percent? 80 percent? 85 percent? When? Do the vaccinated get access to restaurants, movie theatres, airports, and sports events? Who is mandating jabs for workplaces and how are they enforced? 
For some reason, we think we are special. I have no idea why. We are no different from anyone else. And everyone else is well into the debate, sort of like they have been well into the vaccine rollout. 
So yet again we ask, in this land of winging it, hoping for the best with our fingers crossed, what is the target? What are the out-workings of those targets? What is the plan?

Shout out to Auckland this morning, and Northland for that matter. The only two places still waking up in Level 4. Doing the heavy lifting for the rest of the country. Let’s hope it’s only for another two weeks Auckland.. fingers crossed. 
I saw some stats out of Australia yesterday where lockdowns are really starting to bite. One poll showed 86 percent of Australians intend on getting vaccinated – which is higher than pre-Delta. 50 percent of them want lockdowns to end when 80 percent of the country is vaccinated, so getting out of lockdowns is a big impetus.  
Their fears are the same as ours – 58 percent feared businesses closing and job losses, 56 percent worried about what effect lockdowns are having on mental health, which I talked about yesterday. And 52 percent of them find home schooling a negative. 
I think the thing with home schooling is the isolation of children at such a social time of their lives, but also the inequality of it. Your household’s home schooling regime may look very different to someone else’s.  
For every home that has a kid in their PJ’s on a laptop, there will be some homes where the child has no access to computers or wifi, where they just don’t have the resources from their school to be able to work effectively from home.  
I’m very grateful and appreciative to my daughter’s school who seem to have online learning down pat. They take a roll for each class for online attendance, the teacher sets out work and asks if anyone has questions, there are online portals they can go for resources and worksheets, they’re still submitting work and getting it marked.  
It’s probably the easiest age bracket to do the online learning to be honest. Too young for NCEA yet, and too old for primary school, which must be so hard to manage. I can’t begin to imagine how tough it must be to keep children occupied and focused and at that age when so much of the learning is visual and hands on.
Of course, those in Level 3 can’t return to school yet either, so it’s still really tough for households with school children around the country, especially with parents who’re also trying to juggle working from home. 
But yesterday was day 14 for Auckland, and there are 14 more days of that to go. And it got me thinking, what’s our incentive out of this? Obviously, demand is high for the vaccine here, which is good, but we need to keep up that momentum. Having to slow our rollout down due to lack of supply is less than ideal, especially when momentum's building. But where are our incentives?  
New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian has outlined more freedoms for vaccinated people in her state after NSW hits the target of 6 million jabs. She’s outlining a roadmap for a return to normality, and setting targets to get there. 
So, as we sit here in Auckland, on day 15 of a Level 4 lockdown, with at least another two weeks to go, I can’t help wishing we’d adopt a similarly ambitious approach.

Smooth sailing so far for freight moving through the main checkpoint separating Auckland and Waikato. 
Freightways Chief Executive Mark Troughear told Mike Hosking their trucks left by 4am and so far there have been no problems getting through.  
He says they've learned from previous lockdowns and had all their paperwork ready for border crossings  
"Generally, as things happened last time, the longer the regional lockdown went, the better they got at getting trucks through, they sort of learned on the job. You'd expect this time around they'd be pretty efficient from day one." 
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Deliveries are also an option for those who don’t want to queue    
Domino's New Zealand general manager Cameron Toomey told Kate Hawkesby they’re expecting a big day   
But he says, they’ve been here before and they know what to do   
"We do serve a lot of customers every day normally, so we just make sure we've got the right amount of people rostered on and we've got the right procedures in place to allow us to meet the demand." 
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Today will see the return of cafe coffee and gloriously greasy takeaways for those south of Auckland, regarding it can be picked up or delivered under Covid guidelines. 
But for a small business outside of a major city centre the cost of delivering is often hardly worth the profit margin. 
Development West Coast has got a scheme to help with that, and the CEO Heath Milne told Kate Hawkesby an incentive is more effective than a payout. 
"We thought, rather than give cash to businesses, we’ll help them to get into that market, by giving them a rebate for every delivery that they do.” 
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Answer me this question: when you look at the covid outbreak in NSW are you terrified? 
And if you are, what part of what’s happening there terrifies you? 
The case numbers? The hospitalisations? The death rate? 
The reason I ask this is because I was listening to Stuart Nash on with Mike this morning, and he used the death rate in NSW to show how bad things are over there.
Presumably because he’s working on the assumption that we find that scary.
But this morning it dawned me that I don’t actually find that death rate frightening any more.
The total today in their outbreak is 100 deaths. 
There’s really one reason why I don’t look at that and feel terrified and that’s the vaccine.
As far as we can tell, often the deaths in NSW are people who are unvaccinated. 
No one seems to be collecting and publishing how many of the deceased are unjabbed.
But a Google search throws this up: 
Today, 4 dead, all unvaccinated. 
Three days ago, six dead, four unjabbed.
Nearly a week ago, 3 dead, all unjabbed. 
Nearly a month ago, five dead, four unjabbed.
That bears out what we’re now seeing internationally.
Apparently, 95% of the deaths in the UK and the US are people who chose not to get the jab. 
As for the hospitalisation rate, the majority of people in NSW, again, are unvaccinated.
I’m not being callous about death. My own grandmother died of covid. Also unjabbed. 
Actually if there’s anything scary about NSW it’s the length of their lockdown.
They’ve been locked down now for more than 9 weeks and they will be in it for a lot longer yet.
That is the scariest bit about their experience. A lockdown that drags on and on and on.
But I suspect many of us who haven’t wanted to, are now coming to the realisation that at some stage, we will have to confront covid just like the NSW has.
It will overtake us, or we will let down the borders eventually.
And we know it will mean big case numbers and some deaths.
But we can get the jab. And that I think changes everything.
And so that fear of covid is probably losing some of its power.

An immunologist says new vaccine eligibility should be celebrated. 
From today anyone over the age of 12 has the ability to book in to get the Covid-19 jab.  
Despite this some are set to face long waits.  
Malaghan Institute immunologist Graham Le Gros told Kate Hawkesby it needs to be targeted.  
"The regions, Māori community, Pacific community and really make sure that they're really safe too, because they're the ones that live in high-density conditions and they're very vulnerable to this virus if it gets into them." 
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Police hope things will run more smoothly this time around at the Covid checkpoints between Level Four and Level Three, south of Auckland. 
Commissioner Andrew Coster told Mike Hosking  five checkpoints are operating along the border. 
"We are quite dependent on good business documentation, and that will allow us to flow through the checkpoints and the dedicated freight lanes." 
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Auckland Mayor Phil Goff is calling for the Government to vaccinate Aucklanders before the rest of the country if supplies start to run low.
He says "you vaccinate according to levels of risk [...] so, we started with the border workers and then we went to those with comorbidities."
But he says if we look at the current risk in New Zealand, it's clear where it lies. "It lies in Auckland because we're the Gateway City and we've got most of the quarantine facilities."
So he's asking the Government to maintain Auckland as a priority, saying "it doesn't mean that you stop vaccinating elsewhere, it's simply that you maintain a very high level of vaccination in Auckland."
Goff says it's the best way of protecting not only Auckland, but the whole of the country.
With 49 new cases in Auckland announced today, the total number of Covid-19 cases in the community is now 612. Apart from 15 in Wellington, the rest are all in Auckland.
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