Variant sparks concern for schools

Experts have called for the Government to focus on Covid-19 safety in public schools amid the emergence of the Omicron XE variant in New Zealand yesterday.

The Ministry of Health announced the XE variant had been detected in Aotearoa for the first time, found in an overseas traveller. It’s a variant that, while only 10% more transmissible, is expected to affect the number of Kiwis getting infected with the virus, according to Professor Michael Baker of Otago University.

There’s a fresh concern with the variant arriving in New Zealand that schoolchildren are particularly vulnerable, given their statistically low vaccination rates compared with that of adults. Only 22.4% of eligible 5 to 11-year-olds are fully immunised.

‘‘The thing I’m concerned about is orange light doesn’t require any barriers in schools. What environments do they come back to when holidays end?’’ Baker told the Sunday Star-Times. ‘‘We haven’t yet transformed the safety of indoor air in schools. Masks do work, but that barrier is removed in the orange setting.’’

The ministry reported yesterday there were 7930 new community cases of Covid-19, with 494 people in hospital with the virus.

Two people younger than 9 and one person in their 20s are among the deaths of those with Covid-19, which have spanned over the previous seven days.

The country moved to the orange traffic light setting on April 13, where all gathering restrictions were then removed. As part of that shift, mask requirements remain until green, apart from at schools, where they are encouraged but no longer required across the board.

At the time, Baker urged the Government to reconsider its mask requirements for schools.

Another epidemiologist, Dr David Welch at the University of Auckland, made it clear the vaccine rates among children are not where they should be.

With a ‘‘complacent’’ attitude around getting boosted, he said XE is the opportunity to pick the vaccine response back up.

‘‘It’s literally stagnant. It’s almost like people have forgotten about it. The Government did well to get the adult population vaccinated, a mediocre job of rolling it out and a poor job of getting kids vaccinated,’’ he said.

‘‘Something has to spark that conversation. I don’t think XE is going to be the next dominant variant, but there are going to be new variants that do arrive and there’s still a high prevalence of Omicron around.’’