Editorial: Covid lessons shouldn't be forgotten as numbers fall

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention defines long-Covid as having "a wide range of symptoms that can last more than four weeks or even months after infection". Image / AP

After months of stubbornly high coronavirus data, New Zealand is finally seeing definite progress in bringing Covid-19 cases down.

Whereas confirmed case numbers plateaued in April, May and June while still in the several thousands after the first Omicron wave, they are now at the lowest level since February after the second surge.

Recorded cases have fallen steadily from about 11,000 in mid-July to about 2000 now.

New Zealand and Australia's daily new confirmed Covid cases per million people are currently close to the situations in Singapore and leading Northern Hemisphere countries such as Germany, the US, France, Canada and the UK. According to Ourworldindata.org, Australasia is also doing better than South Korea and Japan.

Because the caveat with confirmed cases is the level of reporting, which has dropped away in countries around the globe, the trends in other stats are relevant.

The seven-day average of people in hospital with Covid was down on Friday by more than 100 a week earlier. Daily death numbers have dropped over August. Active Covid cases were down by about 6000 in a week. The figures for border cases and reinfections have also been falling.

It does give the country some confidence that New Zealand will enter the warmer months when people will spend more time outside with a lower level of virus circulating in the community.

People can hope that a new Omicron strain or some new variant won't set this country and the rest of the world backwards. Being prepared for one anyway is important as the current crisis eases. There are also still background issues to deal with.

The Ministry of Health last week gave an update on how data is being recorded on long-Covid.

Clinical codes would be used for hospital-level care for patients with "ongoing symptomatic Covid-19" and "post Covid-19 syndrome". This is to track and provide more information about long-Covid in New Zealand.

The ministry had also been working on what constitutes long-Covid and guidelines for rehabilitation to help with patient care.

The public could still do with more information about long-Covid here, how it is affecting New Zealand's health system and society. The public could still do with a transparent deep dive into the handling of the pandemic.

With a new virus it takes a while for research and knowledge to catch up with it, based on real life data of the damage it has wrecked. Policies are made on the fly with what's known at the time and also take competing factors into account.

But what is learned about one virus outbreak should be banked to improve the response next time, otherwise some experiences of the crisis could be wasted.

For instance, a study has found that two-thirds of people with Covid are still infectious five days after their symptoms begins - which suggests that general advice given to people around the world about self-isolation periods has been inadequate.

The Imperial College London study also found that RATs were better at picking when people stop being infectious than correctly showing they have Covid early on in the infection.

After the experience of Covid and the knowledge of its impact, surely immediate advice to the public in a future pandemic will not be limited to 'wash your hands frequently and keep a 2m distance'.

We know for sure that the consequences of such outbreaks can be a lot more severe than what's known at the start.

The more research and reports New Zealand can do on this past pandemic response, to assess what worked and what didn't, the more informed and prepared we will be for other virus attacks.