11/6/2023 0 Comments New zealand lockdownSuccessfully rolling out vaccination has highlighted the critical importance of funding Māori and Pasifika service providers. They include systems for border management and quarantine, a national immunisation register and vaccine mandates/passes, a national case and contact management system, and frameworks to manage physical distancing and mask use. The pandemic response has required New Zealand to swiftly develop a new set of tools for managing this threat. This is an important opportunity to build on the infrastructure assembled during the pandemic response.Įffective pandemic tools matter. ![]() Fortunately, these deficiencies may be addressed with health sector reform, including the establishment of a Public Health Agency and Māori Health Authority. These problems can be partly attributed to the fragmentation and erosion of public health infrastructure. The pandemic is just the latest in a series of public health problems that New Zealand has struggled to manage, including a disastrous contaminated drinking water outbreak in Havelock North and a national measles epidemic. This matters for Covid-19 but would be essential for even worse pandemics, eg from engineered bioweapons. Politicians need to revisit mechanisms that strive for transparency and political consensus. The premature lifting of some safeguards two weeks ago was a likely sign of this politicisation. Unfortunately, such agreement has now fractured, with the response increasingly politicised. During the initial phase of the response, efforts were made to achieve multi-party agreement on the response. ![]() Transparency and political consensus matter. Instead, we need to keep emphasising the value of shared health security, the benefits of collective action and the role of government. But this framing is problematic in that it puts too much of the responsibility on to individuals and vulnerable groups to manage the risks they face. An emerging alternative framing of “ learning to live with it” is somewhat understandable given the nature of Omicron. This was a strength of the elimination strategy in that it could rightfully celebrate the benefits of working together (the “team of 5 million”). The behaviour of individuals affects others. By their very nature, pandemics are a shared threat. This starting point reinforces a number of key principles, notably: leadership that listens to the science a focus on equity and partnership with Māori use of the precautionary principle in the face of uncertainty and the need to create legacy benefits for our healthcare and public health systems.įraming and effective communication matter. During the course of the pandemic the New Zealand government has emphasised that the response is primarily focused on protecting public health. So what can it learn from the past two years?įirstly, principles matter. ![]() New Zealand will need to maintain and even strengthen some controls in the months ahead. Many thousands of future cases of long Covid seem plausible in adults and possibly children. However, the high infection rate with the current Omicron wave has pushed numbers in hospital with Covid-19 to over 1,000 at its peak and cumulative deaths are approaching 400. The shift to mitigation was supported by the lower severity of Omicron and the relatively high vaccination coverage of the population.
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