24 August 2021
Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield says the Health Ministry was never against increasing surge capacity for contact-tracing, despite it being explicitly mentioned in an independent review of the February outbreak.
Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield says the Health Ministry was never against increasing surge capacity for contact-tracing, despite it being explicitly mentioned in an independent review of the February outbreak.
He has also revealed that the youngest case in the outbreak so far is less than 1 year old.
Bloomfield and other health officials appeared with Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins today before the health select committee to answer questions from Opposition MPs.
There were 41 new cases today, including 38 in Auckland, and three in Wellington.
There are now 148 cases in the whole cluster, with 11 cases in Wellington and the rest in Auckland.
Contact tracing capacity has come into the splitlight, as almost 16,000 contacts have been identified, but half of them are still awaiting test results.
A review by public health experts - as part of the independent advisory group led by Sir Brian Roche - into the February cases found a ministry reluctant to increase surge capacity for contact-tracing, and an unwillingness to stress-test the system or do scenario-planning.
It said this contributed to ongoing uncertainty about the system's ability to handle a large outbreak.
But asked about this today, Bloomfield rejected how the ministry was portrayed.
"That's not a view I did or do hold, that we didn't need to continue to build surge capacity," Bloomfield told the committee.
"I can't speak to why it was reflected as such in the report but it's certainly never been my position, nor that of any senior member in the ministry."
Last week, Roche said that the ministry had been working on scenario-planning and increasing surge capacity, having previously been reluctant to do so.
The ministry says its contact tracing system can manage up to 3000 new contacts per day (associated with up to 180 cases) and this can be scaled to manage 6000 new contacts per day (associated with 1000 cases).
Public health director Caroline McElnay revealed that about half of the highest risk of contacts were still yet to have their test results returned.
There were 369 close plus contacts, 51 per cent of which had test results, and 11 per cent were positive, she said.
There were 14,967 close contacts, 56 per cent had returned test results, and 0.2 per cent were positive.
And there were 405 casual plus contacts, about half of whom were tested, with no positive results so far.
Bloomfield said cases were increasingly coming from locations of interest or from close contacts, rather than from people who were infected pre-lockdown.
Director General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Under questioning, Hipkins wouldn't say whether the Government has offered more money to Pfizer in order to speed up deliveries of vaccine supply.
"I'm not going to get into our commercial negotiations."
He said Pfizer has not made an offer of faster delivery of supplies for more money.
He has previously said that throwing more money at Pfizer to jump the queue would be "unethical".
"That would have been unethical, trying to effectively bribe our way to get more earlier. It's just not the way we operate as a Government," Hipkins told the Herald in July.
Hipkins said the Government stepped down from alert levels in Auckland too soon in February this year, and had to be escalated again - and that lesson had been learnt.
The Government was "acutely" aware of challenges with the healthcare workforce, but it was something that one Government couldn't quickly fix.
"The overall health workforce is still under pressure."
Hipkins said he didn't know how many ICU nurses have been brought into New Zealand since the pandemic started.
Since April 2020, 353 registered nurses were approved for a border exemption to come to New Zealand, and 331 of them are still onshore.
Immigration NZ does not collect information on whether any of them are ICU nurses.
There are now 519 primary care providers involved in the vaccination rollout, including 143 pharmacies and 289 medical centres.
Hipkins said he had been told that the Janssen vaccine, which has been given Medsafe approval, couldn't be delivered in the third quarter of this year, and a fourth quarter delivery "may be possible but may be challenging".
Medsafe approved Janssen in July for those 18 and over, and the Government has bought five million doses and was hoping to have it as a vaccinating option, though it still wanted to focus on Pfizer.
Today's cases were announced at 1pm.
Eighty-nine of the 148 total cases have been epidemiologically linked, and while the other 59 cases are being investigated, Bloomfield said there is nothing to suggest at the moment that they are part of a separate chain of transmission.
One of the cases is an Auckland MIQ worker, but they had caught the virus as a contact of an existing case rather than being suspected of being the potential source.
Bloomfield revealed earlier today for the first time the number of cases in subclusters: 58 cases in the Assembly of God church service in Mangere, and 23 cases in the Birkdale group.
He said there were six subclusters in total and the other four had far fewer cases.
The church subcluster, which included six people in Wellington, included people who had been at the August 15 service and their close contacts.
Bloomfield said there were 27 different church groups that took part in the service, and the total number of people at the service was yet to be determined. More than 500 people have been tested.
There are now almost 16,000 contacts, 6000 of whom are still yet to be contacted. Of the 369 "very close contacts", 10 per cent were yet to be contacted.
Bloomfield said the Health Ministry was putting together more information about how many of the cases might spent any time in the community before the lockdown while infectious, including whether any of them might be essential workers.
He said while there was an increase in the number of cases today, there hadn't been an exponential increase, and if the lockdown was working, case numbers would peak in the coming days.
