Next week it will have been a year since the World Health Organisation named B.1.1.529 a coronavirus variant of concern, now known as Omicron. Photo / Uma Shankar Sharma
Next week it will have been a year since the World Health Organisation named B.1.1.529 a coronavirus variant of concern, now known as Omicron. Photo / Uma Shankar Sharma
EDITORIAL
Three years since it first emerged in China, Covid-19 is now background noise as far as many Kiwis and other people around the world are concerned.
However, health experts are still concerned there could be a variant twist to come, as scientists find out more about thisnovel disease that caused such global disruption.
The Ministry of Health estimates there have been about 1.8 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in New Zealand during the pandemic. Reinfections are put at about 48,000.
With data about Covid limited after the easing of restrictions and behavioural changes in response, these can only be broad estimates.
Research on the ongoing health impacts of Covid suggests people shouldn’t be complacent. Both infections and reinfections can cause long Covid.
Last week, a study based on information from about half a million United States veterans found that getting Covid more than once doubles the risk of death.
Repeated infections appear to compound ill effects. Photo / Chris Weissenborn
The reinfected were three times more likely to be hospitalised than those who had caught the virus once.
Repeat infections also boost the odds of problems with various body organs including the brain, heart, and lungs.
Researchers from Washington University reported in Nature Medicine that the risk appeared to increase with each reinfection. They analysed health records of 443,000 people who had been through a confirmed infection and 41,000 people who were infected at least twice.
The results of the study suggest people should still stay aware of risks. People would be wise to keep a few masks handy and to check whether crowded places they want to go into are ventilated.
A New York Times feature also explored medical links to Covid and symptoms of depression - as opposed to general weariness of the pandemic.
People should also keep the situation here in perspective. Covid case-counts in New Zealand are well below the waves of March/April and July/August, even with cases increasing slightly both here and in Australia.
The ministry’s weekly data shows a fairly stable situation, although case numbers are up from where they were in September and early October. Cases of Covid among passengers on visiting cruise ships attract outsized attention but are small additions to the country’s coronavirus soup.
Experts have argued that better monitoring of Omicron subvariants is needed. Covid-19 modeller Dr Dion O’Neale has said that a lack of surveillance data in the form of an infection prevalence survey, makes it harder to draw conclusions about Covid trends here.
Presently, there’s reason to be positive about general direction of the pandemic, with subvariants of the Omicron lineage dominating this year, rather than a new variant of concern emerging. If one does appear, it would be called Pi.
The World Health Organisation says the global number of new weekly cases fell by 15 per cent in the week to November 6, compared to the previous week, totaling 2.1 million. Deaths were down by 10 per cent to 9400.
Covid first emerged on a small scale in November 2019, before a cluster in Wuhan, China, was reported that December.
Three years on, there have been 629 million confirmed cases and at least 6.5 million deaths from the coronavirus, although fatalities are believed to be many millions higher.
