A dose of reality
The vaccine rollout has picked up serious steam in recent weeks, with about half of the 12+ population now jabbed with at least one dose, and a quarter fully vaccinated. These numbers don’t tell the full story, however. Kate Newton and Henry Cooke report.
With Covid-19 loose in the community, Kiwis are clearly very keen to get vaccinated. In the past week, well over half a million got a dose of the vaccine, with an average of 1.5 per cent of the entire population being jabbed every single day.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been keen to highlight this, holding up an A3 graph proudly at the 1pm podium that showed we could beat Australia at something other than rugby.
Yet while we are going faster than Australia, we’re still behind it – as the Opposition is keen to point out. Indeed we’re still behind almost every other developed country, although we did pass Mexico this week, meaning that phrase ‘‘the bottom of the OECD’’ no longer quite applies.
Ignoring the rest of the world, there are also massive disparities in our rollout between regions and ethnicities. Let’s take a look.
The basics: How much of the population is protected
Every other large-ish country has seen its vaccine rollout plateau at a certain point – usually in the 60s or 70s.
Let’s get these overall numbers out of the way. (If you’re looking for how this compares to other countries, keep reading.)
As of midnight on Tuesday,
2.3 million people have had at least a single dose of the vaccine.
That comes out to just over half of the eligible population of people aged
12+ – just under 4.4 million people – or 51 per cent. If you instead look at our full population, including those aged under 12, it’s about 45 per cent.
But you need two doses of the Pfizer vaccine to be fully protected (perhaps even three). So far, 1.2 million people have had both doses. That’s about 27 per cent of the 12+ population, or 24 per cent of the full population.
The most vulnerable are not yet protected
The vaccine is now available for everyone in New Zealand aged 12+. But the earlier priority groups, identified in an effort to get it to the neediest first, have not been ‘‘finished’’.
Group 1 – border workers – seems to be largely complete, although there are always new gaps being found. The Ministry of Health estimated this group was about 50,000 people, but just under 64,000 people have had a first dose – so obviously that was a bit of an undercount.
Group 2 – frontline health workers and those in rest homes – are still not all jabbed. The ministry thought there were about 480,000 of them, but there are clearly more: 543,000 people in this group have had a first dose. That sounds good, but just
442,000 have had both doses, meaning there are about 100,000 Kiwis who qualify to be in this urgent group but are only partially protected.
The real gap, however, is in group 3, which covers both over65s and those with a condition such as asthma that makes them particularly susceptible to
Covid-19. This group is massive – indeed, the ministry has no idea how big it is.
About 750,000 people are over
65, while between 700,000 and
1.2m people have some kind of other condition that makes them eligible.
Even without certainty about the total group size, we can be sure they are not all protected. Just 667,000 people in group 3 have had a single dose or more, while 470,000 have had both doses. Given we know that there are 750,000 or so people aged over
65+, we can be certain many of these vulnerable people aren’t protected.
There are caveats. Many people who qualify to be in group
3 may be unaware and get the jab as part of group 4. But it is striking that group 4 – healthy people under 65 with no existing conditions – have now overtaken group 3, with 1m of them having had a first dose, and
242,000 having a second.
This probably has something to do with the booking system. Many people in group
3 will have booked their vaccines well before the ‘‘big’’ rollout got started, and with it the huge mass vaccination centres and doses at GP clinics. They might not have been able to find an appointment until late September or October, while those in group 4 booking in recent weeks could often find a slot on the same day.
We can also look at this in terms of ethnicity, as we know Ma¯ ori are more vulnerable to
Covid-19 than others.
Ma¯ ori continue to lag the overall vaccination rate of other ethnicities. While over a quarter of the 12+ population is now double-jabbed (27 per cent), just
18 per cent of Ma¯ ori are. Some of this can be explained by age structure – Ma¯ ori form a younger subset of the population, so will have fewer people eligible earlier – but not all of it.
Ma¯ ori aged 30-49 are about a third less likely to have had a vaccine dose than the general population in that age bracket. Ma¯ ori aged 12-29 are about half as likely to have had a dose.
This disparity is much more pronounced for Ma¯ ori than it is for Pasifika, who are lagging the population overall, but are actually more likely than the general population to be jabbed in some age brackets. This suggests that the Pasifika disparity can more readily be explained by age structure.
What about around the country?
New Zealand’s healthcare system varies massively based on where you live, thanks to its 20 district health boards (DHBs).
This can easily be seen in the rollout figures. Someone living in Nelson/Marlborough, the best-performing DHB in the country, is about twice as likely as someone living in Taranaki to be fully vaccinated.
If we look just at first doses, a whopping two-thirds of the 12+ population have had a vaccine in
Nelson/Marlborough. In the Auckland and Wellington regions, about half of the population has had a dose – roughly matching the national average. Canterbury lags those other major centres, with just
44.5 per cent of the 12+ population having a single dose.
For full vaccinations, Wellington’s DHBs are in a far worse position – just 22.2 per cent of the
12+ population has had both doses, compared to 26.8 per cent across the country. Canterbury is also lagging behind with just
22.3 per cent of its 12+ population fully protected. Auckland is ahead of the curve, meanwhile, with 28.5 per cent.
But it is Nelson/Marlborough again leaving the rest of the country in the dust: well over a third of the 12+ population (37.1 per cent) is fully protected. Just behind it are Wairarapa, South Canterbury, and the West Coast.
How fast are we going? When will we finish?
New Zealand is now vaccinating at a rapid clip. Over the past week, about 79,000 doses a day were administered on average, with some days far higher. Most of them were first doses – about
56,000 first doses to 23,000 second. This is faster than Australia is currently going, proportionately – about 1.56 doses per 100 people every day, compared with
1.08 for Australia. It’s faster than the United Kingdom, United States or Canada ever managed.
If this rate were maintained, the entire rollout would be done by November 5. Eighty per cent of the 12+ population would have had a first dose by September 21, and 90 per cent would manage it by September 29.
But it’s not quite that simple. Every other large-ish country has seen its vaccine rollout plateau at a certain point – usually in the 60s or 70s, as they run out of the very eager and start trying to reach the hesitant.
And there’s some chance New Zealand won’t even keep this rate up while the demand is still there. Ministers are working urgently to source some new vaccine doses to keep up with current record demand, as it is going far more quickly than expected, and the country isn’t due to receive any really big new batches until October. The ministry had only 184,000 doses on hand as of August 29, though this doesn’t count doses already distributed to DHBs.
This doesn’t mean the rollout will stop. But the Government has suggested it could mean it has to slow back down to about 350,000 doses a week – well below the half-million managed last week.
This could well see us stay near the bottom of the OECD for another month at least. And just when we were about to overtake Australia.