Protecting yourself and our community

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

A second negative Covid-19 test from Gisborne City wastewater samples this week is a huge relief, coming after the sewer valves were closed so encompassing the city's whole wastewater catchment again.

The negative results this week indicate that whoever was shedding the virus a week earlier is no longer doing so, and nor is anyone else — so the Covid case who was in our city appears to have not infected other people — or the (very slim) possibility the two tests last week both returned false positive results.

Whatever the case, the imperative for anyone with Covid or flu-like symptoms to get tested remains.

It is clear that people with exemptions to leave Auckland and the Waikato are a big risk factor for spreading this highly infectious virus to other areas — the latest example being recent positive wastewater tests in Stratford that are now explained by a household of six infected people who were reluctant to get tested, and only identified this week after one needed hospital care. They caught the virus from a person who was connected to the Auckland outbreak.

Those who question the need to protect themselves and others from this virus via vaccination would do well to read today, and also the of Whanau-a-Apanui nurse Mahina Adams in yesterday's paper, from her time in an emergency ward and ICU in Paris early in the pandemic where she “saw more than 30 of my patients in body bags”.

“It wasn't just old people, young people, people my age were dying as well,” said Adams, 23, who lost colleagues as well as patients.

They were having to choose who to save, and found themselves only taking care of the under 70s as they were more likely to survive.

“It was like a war — it's not something to play with,” she said in urging people to get vaccinated.

“Covid can happen to anyone. We need to manage it by getting the vaccine, and that's especially important (for Maori) because Maori whanau are really close to each other. So if you get it, you spread it to your whanau.”

The evidence behind Covid-19 vaccines that have now been administered to more than 4 billion people worldwide is clear; they are effective at preventing infection, and especially effective at preventing serious illness and death.

Vaccination is not just a personal decision. The idea of “my body, my right” is a dangerous rallying cry in a pandemic, when your choices can affect so many other people, even kill them.