Podcast: the detail
With cases steadily rising from the relatively stable plateau of recent months, is New Zealand in for a Covid summer?
This summer, New Zealand is in a markedly different place than a year ago when it comes to Covid-19.
Last December, Auckland had just emerged from lockdown and widespread health measures were still in place.
“Two shots for the summer” was the government’s slogan as it tried to boost vaccination rates.
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The hope was that Summer would act as a circuit breaker and stop the nascent Delta variant. A season of outdoor recreation in the ventilating breeze was a well-timed opportunity to gain a foothold in New Zealand’s long and slow battle with the virus.
But this year, as we enter summer, case numbers are rising again after a relatively stable plateau.
This time, one complex mix of subvariants and the lifting of most health restrictions seems to have left the deputy director of the Department of Health, Dr Andrew Old, somewhat unsure about how the summer months will play out.
“As much as we would all like to, we are not out of the covid forest yet,” he said.
Press roomMarc Daalder has been closely following the government’s response to the pandemic from the start.
He says there’s no reason to think we’ll be out of the woods any time soon.
“Everything we know so far about Covid and viruses in general tells us that it will indeed continue to mutate and evolve, but there is no specific reason it should evolve to become less severe than it is now,” he says .
“It’s possible, but it’s not guaranteed.”
And with a relatively high uptake of a vaccine effective at reducing severity but not as effective at stopping the spread, the stage is set for another wave.
It could be good timing, though, as more outdoor recreation and less winter flu do their part to reduce the spread and reduce the likelihood of the health system becoming overloaded – crucial at a time when the industry is still clamoring for solutions to its widespread workforce shortages .
However, the Kiwi tradition of touring the country during the Christmas season could also mean shifting the spread between provinces into a different gear.
Meanwhile, a varied mix of different versions of the virus hitting the population at the same time adds another layer of complexity.
David Welch, a computational biologist from the University of Auckland, said that while reduced constraints likely played a larger role in the surge, new variants recorded in New Zealand have had impacts around the world.
“In the background, we are starting to see more and more new variants coming, and they are having an impact all over the world,” he says.
“They’re starting to reach quite significant levels in New Zealand, and may cause another rise in cases.”
While in the past a new variant has appeared with a clear advantage and established itself as the main form of Covid-19 going around, the variant soup is made of a much more gradually changing set of viruses, slowly changing via antigenic drift – the gradual accumulation of small changes to a virus that transform it over time.
Rather than a step-by-step journey through the Greek alphabet, Covid’s new changing face appears to be a more complex series of letters arranged to indicate a slow and step-by-step change from the original virus.
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