Covid 19 Omicron outbreak: Staffing issues force Auckland school Carmel College to go online

One Auckland school is going back to online learning this week due to Covid-19.

A note on the Carmel College website says it's made the call to revert to online learning from today to Friday as it's no longer able to staff classes.

As well as battling Covid, influenza, RSV and tummy bugs, staff are also having to care for ill family members.

With experts warning New Zealand is seeing the start of another Omicron surge, it's hoped the school holidays in a week's time will act as a circuit breaker before the virus runs rampant.

At Whangaparāoa College in north Auckland, principal Steve McCracken estimated last week that one in five staff were away each day.

"We are struggling to hang on to maintain normality in terms of the openness of school," McCracken told the Herald.

"We've got a significantly higher proportion of staff and learner absence than normal. But our staff are doing a pretty amazing job around covering classes, keeping things operational."

Carmel College on Auckland's North Shore is reverting to online learning.

Attendance was around 70-75 per cent on any given day, which was 10-15 per cent lower than normal at this time of year. Illness had "accelerated substantially" over the past four weeks.

Staff absences were also about 10 per cent up on last year due to a combination of Covid, other illnesses, and people "rightly" being more cautious than they had been in the past about coming in sick.

The school had managed to avoid rostering students home and mostly was avoiding combining classes, thanks to the "extreme goodwill" of staff who were filling in for each other, he said. But a number of students had missed a significant amount of learning time.

"We're pretty concerned leading into NCEA around what that is going to do for our senior learners' achievement."

A new Covid-19 variant is expected to become the dominant strain in the community within weeks as cases surge and an expert warns we could be "losing the arms race with the virus".

University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker has again urged Kiwis to brace for the second Omicron wave as the community case average increased by almost 50 per cent in nine days.

Baker described the 49 per cent increase of the seven-day rolling average of cases on June 25 (4737) to yesterday (7046) as an "abrupt rise" and indicative that New Zealand could be at the beginning of another infection wave.