High hospitalisations and presentations were continuing to place pressure across hospitals in New Zealand. Video / NZ Herald
Chris Hipkins says he is optimistic about where New Zealand is placed as it braces for the Omicron peak, but he warns that the death toll could still jump when the virus spreads among the elderly.
"I'm feeling a lot more optimistic than I was a month ago when Iwas feeling incredibly nervous about where we were going to head," the Covid-19 Response Minister told the Herald in an exclusive interview.
"Obviously, any death in any way, shape or form is a tragedy. But I'm optimistic that we're not going to see that huge sort of daily number of people dying that we've seen in other places."
A month ago, Omicron was starting to spread into the community and there were still more than a million New Zealanders without a booster shot, which is much more effective than two doses against Omicron. School had returned after the holidays, but the rollout for 5 to 11-year-olds had only just started.
This week the Ministry of Health changed the way it was reporting Covid-related deaths, which are now at 98, having rocketed up in recent weeks.
This is still far below the per-capita death tolls of other developed countries, which have grappled with more virulent strains of the virus at a time when their populations were less vaccinated.
Covid deaths per capita. Note this still uses 65 as New Zealand's official total, though it has since been updated to 98. Source / Our World in data
The Omicron outbreak is peaking firstly in Auckland, where hospitalisation numbers may have already plateaued, and among younger people (56 per cent of recorded cases are 30 and under).
That has also had an effect on the number of fatalities because young people, while less vaccinated than the elderly, are less likely to suffer severe health effects.
"So far the outbreak has been more focused in younger cohorts of people. It will make its way into the older population. It probably already has by now.
"In the next few weeks, that will be instructive as to whether we're going to see a higher rate of mortality or hospitalisations amongst that group."
This was emphasised by Dr Andrew Old, the Northern Region Health Coordination Centre's chief clinical officer, who said a long tail tended to affect older people more towards the end of an outbreak.
This was also evident in the average age of those who were in hospital, he said, which had crept up towards 40.
He also warned that it was unclear how the peak would unravel, and other countries had experienced a series of peaks.
"Summer is not a terrible time to be dealing with us. And the high rates of vaccination and boosting that we managed to achieve before we started dealing with the peak certainly put us ahead of where others were.
"We were only a couple of months ahead of Australia in terms of boosters when we started to hit our peak, but that seems to have made a huge difference."
How the interventions to slow the spread - mask-use, social distancing, limits on gatherings, QR code scanning, vaccine mandates and vaccine passes - would be used in an updated traffic light system was still being worked through, he said.
But there would be a time - perhaps very soon after the peak - when the window for using many of those measures would close.
He said the vaccine mandates and requiring the vaccine pass were both justified in the Delta era, as being vaccinated had more of an effect at preventing transmission than with Omicron.
But limits on how the unvaccinated could gather in groups will, "at some point, become unjustified, and we may not be far off there".
The same applied for certain vaccine mandates, which would be less useful when much of the relevant workforces - such as police, defence force staff and prison workers - were already highly vaccinated.
He was looking into whether the Government should continue to allow certain private providers to choose to require vaccine passes.
"Do we think that's a justified limitation for employers to be able to do that? What do we do to make sure that they can continue to do it? Those are very much going to be live issues as we step through the next bit."
