Dr Ashley departs as Covid lingers

It’s been a milestone week in the Covid-19 pandemic with nods to the past and future, here and overseas. In New Zealand, the face of public health during the crisis, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, stepped down from his role as director-general yesterday.

It has been an arduous position to hold over the past two and a half years, and Bloomfield leaves almost a year before his term was due to expire and after a quarter of a century working in the sector.

Throughout, especially during the plunge into the unknown of the first pandemic lockdown in 2020,

Bloomfield has been the epitome of unflappable reasonableness — delivering facts, advice and explanations at press conferences alongside the prime minister in a calm and calming manner. New Zealand’s own pandemic superhero spurned the cape to stay Clark Kent.

It has been a huge challenge and Bloomfield’s ability to be clear and make complex, information about the evolving coronavirus crisis readily understandable has been an important part of how the country has handled the pandemic.

Despite the sad surge in Covidlinked deaths this year, potentially thousands of deaths were avoided in the first two years, and few comparable countries have done better overall. However, messaging on mask-wearing could certainly have been better early on, and Bloomfield bows out with the country still in a difficult position.

Although confirmed community case numbers have been dropping, they could once again remain plateaued as they have been for most of the past three months under the Government’s orange traffic light settings.

And hospitalisations have been rising, with 827 on Thursday compared to 808 the day before.

The seven-day average was 790 compared with 766 a week earlier.

It’s a markedly worse position than where the country was at on June 23 when 300 people were in hospital with Covid.

The World Health Organisation also notes Covid death rates have increased and several countries have reported rising hospitalisations.

With its pandemic response, New Zealand, as with other countries, has had to balance competing concerns, including health ones.

Not just the coronavirus’ impacts but delays in dealing with other diseases, strains on medical workers, and people’s general wellbeing including mental health.

Globally there has been alarm at outbreaks of monkeypox, marburg virus and polio during the pandemic.

A new report says that even longtime progress against Aids has been pushed “significantly off track” by Covid, according to Matthew Kavanagh, the deputy executive director of UNAids.

Two new studies have suggested that the original theory about Covid’s escape — that it came from the wild via a Wuhan market — is still the most likely one.

The fear still lurks that history could repeat in a similar way at some stage.

In the United States, the White House held a summit this week on where the pandemic could be headed and what treatments need to be developed.

President Joe Biden emerged from a bout of Covid telling Americans they can “live without fear” of the pandemic if they get booster shots and make use of treatments.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US medical adviser, told the summit that despite the current vaccines the “job is not done”.

He said: “Innovative approaches are clearly needed to induce broad and durable protection against coronaviruses known and unknown.”

The summit discussed the likelihood of a shot covering future coronavirus variants and vaccines in future being delivered by nasal spray — there are several in clinical trials — or skin patches.

In the US, developing the original Covid vaccines in record time with drug companies cost an estimated US$18 billion in federal investment.

As a comparison, US military spending in 2021 was about US$800b.

Developing new vaccines and approaches would also require significant resources for it to happen quickly and funding approval from Congress, so the summit was probably a plea to representatives and a message to the wider public.

Research efforts on new vaccines are fractured into various projects and are struggling without enough funding and other issues.

Despite weariness with the coronavirus, the world plainly needs to keep up research efforts to combat new threats, whether they be a variant or other viruses.