Editorial: As Omicron wave declines, NZ still can't let down its guard

Health authorities need to know when new variants arrive here. Photo / 123RF

As New Zealand makes its slow slide out of the Omicron outbreak, the last thing anyone wants to think about is the next potential bump in the road.

People have been moving around over Easter, more travellers are arriving from overseas, Kiwis are planning their own foreign trips, the country's Covid-19 traffic lights have changed from red to orange.

Even allowing for less data over the holiday break, the numbers on Sunday continued the downward trend. The seven-day rolling average of cases was at 8170 compared to 10,543 a week previous. The day's vaccination numbers - 1523 in total - reflected saturation coverage and pandemic apathy. There have been 4 million first doses given, 3.9 million second doses, 2.6m boosters, and 365,000 paediatric first and second doses.

But even though the country is living in a more open and exposed way with the virus, that doesn't mean it can be ignored.

Another Covid wave could strike as early as winter or spring. Since new Omicron subvariants have popped up in Australia, they are sure to land here before long.

XE is a combo of two subvariants but the World Health Organisation hasn't yet labelled it a variant of concern. It is also investigating another to arrive in Australia, either BA.4 or BA.5

By New Zealand's spring, Pfizer and BioNTech are aiming to have a booster ready for US approval targeting Omicron and its subvariants and other known strains of the virus.

Former Biden Administration pandemic adviser Andy Slavitt tweeted that: "The expectation is that continued mutations of Covid will come from the Omicron family and modellers predict next [northern hemisphere] winter to be the next big wave potential. We will want to provide the booster that covers best in the most scenarios."

Omicron has proved to be particularly lethal to the unvaccinated.

The continuing importance of boosters to avoiding death from Omicron was underlined last week in South Australian state data.

Statistics compiled since the start of the Omicron wave there showed unvaccinated people are more than three times as likely to die from Covid than those who've had three vaccine shots.

Omicron's startling transmissibility has scientists considering that the best way to combat future variants would involve blocking infections, which could result in a vaccine at some stage being delivered as a nasal spray. The US has also authorised its first breathalyser test for Covid, which takes three minutes.

More data on the overall pandemic is emerging as countries analyse the impact of vaccines and policies.

A United States study estimated that the country's vaccine programme saved about 2.2 million lives.

Research on Covid in England concluded that bringing in the first lockdown a week earlier there could have resulted in 34,000 fewer deaths while halving the time the country spent at home. Its early pandemic response was widely regarded as sluggish at the time.

The New York Times reported that the WHO has estimated that the true pandemic death toll is at least 15 million people up to the end of 2021. It has yet to release those figures, reportedly because of a dispute with New Delhi over the counting of India's dead.

Here, New Zealand experts still can't rule another variant being a game-changer.

"Having good surveillance - including whole genome sequencing, infection prevalence type surveys, and monitoring behavioural factors - will be crucial for early detection of new variants," modeller Dr Emily Harvey said.

The need for testing and reporting tests allied with some mask wearing hasn't gone away.