Mark Dalder
Marc Daalder is a Wellington-based senior political reporter covering Covid-19, Climate Change, Energy, Primary Industry, Technology and the Far Right. Twitter: @marcdaalder.
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COVID-19
Variant plans shed in detail remain unprepared for future varieties in New Zealand and may begin to spread here before we know they exist.・ Darder reports
comment: Months of work by officials in preparation for future variants of Covid-19 have produced a sparsely detailed seven-page document.
The long-awaited variant plan is not really a plan. The government may also be allowed to dare not predict the future, but it does not say which scenario is most likely to occur.
In most cases, the variant plan consists of a list of features that will help you tackle the Covid-19 strain, such as testing and contact tracing capabilities. It also details the internal process for assessing risk from new variants and presents five potential scenarios.
They cause more serious illnesses, are more contagious than Omicron, and are mildly blocked by existing immune barriers from the worst-case scenarios of vaccines and variants that avoid infection-induced immunity. It extends to the best case variants. Health Director Ashley Bloomfield said that Omicron’s subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which are now slowly spreading in the community, belong to the latter category.
That doesn’t mean they can’t do any harm – the average daily death toll for Covid-19 is 12. 9 dead. Over a year, it kills more than 3,000 people, or six times worse than the average flu year.
Due to the lack of variant plan details, there are concerns that new stocks will not be able to respond appropriately and quickly.
Omicron, Delta, Alpha, and even the wild-type coronavirus no longer have the luxury they had to see how other parts of the world worked on it. It took two months to prepare for the arrival of the Omicron variant. While other countries suffered from troublesome quarantine periods that caused labor shortages, the government was able to formulate and debut plans to steadily reduce quarantine periods as the number of cases increased.
Of course, other aspects of our Omicron reaction did not learn lessons from overseas experience. Despite expert warnings, PCR tests were overwhelmed faster than the government expected. Even the early warning system was unable to respond to Omicron without error.
The government doesn’t see it that way, but its early warning system is now gone. Covid-19’s Minister of Response, Ayesha Verrall, undertook a large amount of ongoing genomic monitoring when the plan was announced. This gives an overview of the rise of new variants, which variants are on the border, and whether there are areas that are more affected by a particular variant than others.
However, for those at the forefront of genomic sequencing efforts, the lack of border control and the fact that the majority of cases are no longer sequenced makes our early warning system very early in the pandemic. Say it means different.
“Our genome surveillance is different than before. We used to know variants of all cases in New Zealand, but now we are doing population-level surveillance like most other parts of the world. “Gema Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, told Newsroom.
“You may not know for a few weeks after a new variant has gained a foothold in New Zealand. We don’t have these early warning systems. We knew about Delta. We knew about Omicron before we arrived here. But that might be it. I don’t know about the variant until it’s already spread here. “
That’s what other parts of the world have experienced at Omicron. It was first reported in a few countries in southern Africa in late November. Borders were closed in these countries, but it was already too late-Omicron spread to other parts of the world and was ahead of a series of border closures. By mid-December, it had been sent in almost every country. By January, it was responsible for most of the world’s incidents.
New Zealand will have the same experience with the next variant. It may close the border to a specific location, but it is unlikely to prevent the arrival of new variants.
Therefore, there are concerns about the lack of detail in variant planning. At Omicron, we didn’t have a variant plan, but we were able to combine it into one in a couple of months.
In the next variant, it will take weeks or days to start a new response. If the variant corresponds to the worst scenario of the Ministry of Health, its lack of preparation is tragic and fatal.