Covid Watch

Health officials are scrambling to identify the link in a new Covid-19 community case in Auckland.
So far, authorities haven't traced the infection back to the border or MIQ.
Siouxsie Wiles says that while we don't know what strain of Covid the new case has yet, given that Delta is the dominant strain, we can probably assume it's Delta until we hear otherwise.
She also encourages people not to panic and reminds them not to stockpile and that the supermarkets will remain open.
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Business New Zealand says the Government has plenty of work to do, to prepare the country for gradually reopening borders.
Chief Executive Kirk Hope told Kate Hawkesby at the moment, we're extremely vulnerable.
“I don’t think we’d have the capacity, if an outbreak occurred, to manage it particularly quickly, particularly if it’s Delta, because we haven’t advanced contact tracing.”
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An Emeritus Professor of Medicine and Immunologist is warning Australians to take lockdown more seriously.
I’m watching Australia closely at the moment with this Delta outbreak, because I can’t help thinking we are just one border mishap away from Delta being our problem here too.
And like Australia, we’ll have no choice but to lock down immediately.
Thankfully, we have form here on taking lockdowns seriously, we seemed to oblige willingly the last few times we’ve had them, most Kiwis seemed to get it. But I wonder with the onset of time, whether we’ll get less compliant with lockdowns.
Towards the end of the last Auckland lockdown, people were over it, flouting a few more rules, and it didn’t take us all long to ditch the contact tracing and mask wearing.
So we’ve become complacent.
In Australia, they’re watching what’s happening in America, where fully vaccinated people are still getting infected with Covid. So the message appears to be that while vaccination rates are crucial, so is keeping up certain restrictions around our movement.
And this is the part we may take a while to get our heads around.
In the States, the professor points out the ‘American summer provides a real-time cautionary tale.. Despite having only 50 per cent of the population fully vaccinated, related restrictions were eased prematurely.’ and in ‘Cape Cod, hundreds crowded into the popular holiday area where the virus had a field day.’
Most alarmingly, he says, ‘74 per cent of the infections occurred in fully vaccinated people.’ So, now they're back to even vaccinated people wearing masks, even when they’re inside.
And of course, to maintain social distancing.
So is the vaccination push giving us all false hope?
Vaccination may not be the ticket to freedom we think it is, because what these latest waves of Covid are telling us, is that it's not that simple.
You might not die or get as sick if you’re vaccinated, but it doesn’t mean you can’t still catch it and pass it on.
In Iceland, 86 per cent of the population has been fully vaccinated; their government thought they had the pandemic beat, so they loosened restrictions too. But with Delta seeing case numbers soar, they too have put restrictions back in place. The same goes for Israel.
We are of course way behind on all this, as we don’t even have our vaccination rates up to a suitable level of protection in the first place, but we should be mentally preparing ourselves for the fact that even when we do, it’s not necessarily the cure all.
Even into 2022 and beyond, we may be required to wear masks and social distance. I mean thus far, touch wood; we have somehow, by some sheer miracle, escaped Delta diving into our community. 
But I’m not sure for how long that’ll be the case.

Health officials say the Covid-19 vaccine rollout is well and truly ramping up.
Vaccine bookings are now open for New Zealanders aged 55 and up -- about five days earlier than expected.
It comes the same week the country administered its two-millionth jab.
Ministry of Health Primary Care Lead Joe Bourne told Mike Hosking we've seen a big increase in people getting their vaccine, over the past few weeks.
“If we look at where we were three weeks ago to where we are now, on Wednesday, we had our biggest day to date which was over 45,000 doses given within a day. So I think we’re seeing that scale up happening.”
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I was incredulous at the news we’d had a breach in protocols during the transfer of the Covid patient from Fiji.
I shouldn’t have been, it was always a possibility, and perhaps one of the reasons the medics were so against the transfer in the first place. But to hear that a “PPE protocol incident” had occurred and ended up lumping a health worker into Jet Park for two weeks in MIQ, left me aghast.
Imagine being that health worker – already stretched with RSV raging through the hospitals, your colleagues have all said no thanks to this patient coming, you’ve been over ruled by politicians, and then – beyond your control, the patient gets flown here, and wham, you’re into MIQ for two weeks.
Away from your family, out at the Jet Park, isolating.
Cool.
How completely unnecessary.
Medical experts have been leaping up and down about this since before we even took the patient, but over the weekend Professor of Medicine Des Gorman leapt up and down too.
He criticised the decision saying "it's a pity" health workers here have been put at risk. It is indeed a pity.
The Ministry’s reported as saying "any risks from this incident are low," but why are we taking any risks at all?
What happened to abundance of caution?
What happened to zero risk?
We only need to look to our friends across the Tasman to know how virulent this Delta variant is.
We only need to look at the turtle pace of our vaccine rollout here to know how ill prepared we are.
We don’t contact trace enough anymore, we don’t wear the mandatory masks we’re supposed to on public transport, we are not remotely ready to handle an outbreak here, so why take any risks at all?
Of course as I said last week, this was never a medical decision and you can’t blame the UN worker at the centre of it, it’s not her fault, and we hope she recovers well.
But for the government to ignore the medics, who they’ve followed so religiously throughout this whole pandemic, who they’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with at press conferences, relied on, put everything into the hands of to then suddenly ignore them?
Let’s not forget, as Des Gorman pointed out, "Eighty-five percent of New Zealanders are not vaccinated, they're not immune," he told Newshub.
So as he said, this makes us “unbelievably vulnerable”.
And that's not a time to take risks.
What we have here, is a continuity problem.
Medical staff say no, yet suddenly the government can ignore the advice of clinicians.
Either you respect the medical profession and take their advice, or you don’t.
But what the government now seems to be doing, is picking and choosing when they'll take that advice.
And if it doesn't suit their political agenda, they won't.