Episode description
In today's Focus on Politics podcast, Political Reporter Katie Scotcher assesses where the government's planning is for new and potentially more deadly variants.
"This is a preparedness exercise, it's going to be a high-level plan ... it's not going to be as prescriptive as the other plans we have rolled out in response to Covid because we can't crystal ball gaze about precisely what will turn up." - Ayesha Verrall
When the government relaxed Covid-19 public health measures, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was clear some may not be gone for good, kept "in the back pocket" in case of new and dangerous variants.
With the threat of those variants looming, Associate Minister of Health Ayesha Verrall has asked Ministry of Health officials to draft up a plan outlining the response.
As well as being ready to roll some restrictions out again, it also means monitoring for new variants through genomic sequencing.
Listen to the full podcast here
With Covid-19 continuing to spread, new variants are an inevitability, and Verrall says we need a systematic way of assessing the threat they pose and what the response should be.
The World Health Organisation and other countries like Singapore and the UK are among those working on similar plans, she says, but New Zealand needs to be prepared to be part of the response, and match it to the severity of any new variant.
"We've taken steps to ... reduce down measures as we've had more protection due to vaccination and then with Omicron - because the clinical severity was less - we were able to go to the traffic lights framework, which is less restrictive."
Ministry of Health chief science advisor has been part of the team involved in the planning, and says new dominant variants are generally likely to be more infectious, but a very high severity could reduce infectiousness. Omicron's low severity means worse outcomes cannot be ruled out, however.
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Covid-19 modeller Dion O'Neale hopes improvements can be made to ventilation systems and practices, as well as a greater emphasis on masks.
ACT Leader David Seymour wants improved testing, tracing, PPE provision, vaccine rollout and ICU capacity.
Previous interventions like QR contact tracing and vaccine passes also cannot be ruled out. National Party Covid-19 Response Spokesperson Chris Bishop supports planning for new variants, but describes those as a "severe" response he hopes we've seen the end of. …