Brink of elimination with 2 high-risk cases

Low figure comes with warning it could all be jeopardised when we move to alert level 3

New Zealand’s march towards eliminating Covid-19 has been given a boost, with the key measure of recent community transmission cases falling to just two yesterday.

Success would be “one of New Zealand’s greatest achievements”, according to epidemiologist Sir David Skegg, but he warned it would all be jeopardised if New Zealanders started socialising or crowding the beach at alert level 3.

His comments come as groups representing frontline health workers slammed the Health Ministry over access to personal protective equipment (PPE) and the rollout of flu vaccines, while GPs and pharmacists begged the Government for more funding to stay afloat.

Last night Health Minister David Clark ordered a rapid stocktake of the Health Ministry’s PPE distribution to ensure it was getting to frontline workers in a timely way. With five more days in lockdown, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said most Kiwis had been compliant but there had been 4128 breaches and 430 prosecutions. “While we are looking forward to things we can do under level 3, we must not risk the gains that we have made.”

The list of fatalities rose to 14 yesterday after the death of a woman in her 80s from the Rosewood Rest Home cluster in Christchurch, where seven others have died.

“Every person we lose to Covid-19 is a tragedy,” said director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

With a watertight border and containment of known chains of transmission, the key figure in the fight to eliminate the virus is the number of cases from community transmission.

There have been about 60 such cases in all, but most of them have been contained and isolated by the lockdown.

Recent cases still have the potential to trigger a new outbreak, but the number of cases since the start of April has fallen from six on Sunday to four on Tuesday. Yesterday there were two — and Bloomfield said neither of them seemed to have become infected in recent days.

“They’re not recent onset ones. They’re two where we haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly where the infection may have come from.”

Asked when the number of new cases might drop to zero, he said: “This is the situation we wanted to be in, and the situation we want to stay in.”

Appearing before the parliamentary Epidemic Response Committee yesterday, Skegg said New Zealand could become the first western country in the world to eliminate Covid-19.

But rigorous level 3 compliance was needed, including physical distancing, because community transmission may still be occurring.

Ardern said there were no plans to quarantine aircrew for 14 days because that would create difficult work arrangements, but anyone with symptoms had to isolate.

Bloomfield added that many of the 30 Air New Zealand staff with Covid19 were infected pre-lockdown, but safety measures were being reviewed “to make sure we are not importing any cases through that avenue”. Air NZ says 25 have recovered. Skegg said there remained a need for rapid tracing and isolation of contacts, adding that if that had already been in place the lockdown could have been lifted today.

Australia could also eliminate Covid-19, which he said could open the possibility of an Australasian Covid-free bubble, but other western countries were already beyond the point where elimination was possible.

“I fear that much of the world is going to look like a train-wreck in slow motion.”

University of Auckland professor Shaun Hendy said the modelling he provided to the Government showed the number of community transmission cases falling to zero around May 4. That was why he had advocated for lockdown to be extended for two more weeks, but elimination was still possible despite lifting the lockdown earlier.

,, This is the situation we wanted to be in, and the situation we want to stay in.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield