New Zealand adjusts anti-pandemic measures to curb surge of Omicron infections

This time last year New Zealand had COVID-19 beaten, or so it thought.

Today, as many countries drop border restrictions and learn to live with the virus, New Zealand, with a population of just over five million, is seeing case numbers for new Omicron infections surge.

On March 8 there were 23,894 new Omicron cases, 9,881 of them in Auckland. Just two weeks ago, daily case numbers were in the hundreds.

Not only has the government of Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had to cope with the surge in cases, it also has had to cope with unrest from anti-vaccination protesters.

The spread of Omicron has taken some health authorities in New Zealand by surprise.

Epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the outbreak was expected, "given the experience of countries across the world which have had difficulty containing this highly infectious variant".

Baker, who is professor of Public Health at the University of Otago in Wellington, told China Daily in an email that New Zealand "has operated a very successful elimination and suppression strategy for COVID-19 for the first two years of the pandemic".

He said the strategy has kept cases numbers, hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 at low levels in New Zealand.

Since the pandemic began two years ago, New Zealand had recorded just 65 deaths from COVID-19/Omicron by March 7.

Community transmission of Omicron was identified in New Zealand on January 23 this year. The outbreak wave is now causing large daily case numbers across the country.

The fact that hospitalizations and deaths have been low "reflects the effectiveness of high vaccine coverage", Baker said.

"The rapid rise in case numbers seen here is similar to the experience of Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. All these were relatively successful at COVID-19 elimination for much of the first two years of the pandemic.

"All of them are now adjusting to managing widespread outbreaks driven by the highly infectious Omicron variant," he said.

Baker added New Zealand expects to see case numbers peaking in the next week or so and falling quite rapidly later in March.

New Zealand's Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield has said the country's high rate of vaccination – 80 percent according to Johns Hopkins University – has kept hospitalizations down.

Bloomfield said in a radio interview on March 5 that "for most people, COVID-19 will be a mild to moderate illness that can be managed quite safely at home".

But not everyone has been supportive of the government's vaccination program and its handling of the pandemic.

For two weeks recently, thousands of people opposed to vaccinations laid siege around New Zealand's parliament in Wellington, where police came under a daily barrage of faeces and were sprayed with a liquid that stung exposed skin.

Prime Minister Ardern condemned the violence and what she called "a campaign of disinformation" surrounding COVID-19 and the pandemic, much of which was being driven by similar protests in Canada and the United States.

Ardern described the protests on March 2 as an "attack on our front-line police, it was an attack on our parliament, it was an attack on our values, and it was wrong".

She said that while "many of us have seen that disinformation and dismissed it as conspiracy theory, a small portion of our society have not only believed it, they have also acted upon it in an extreme and violent way that cannot stand".

New Zealand's Ministry of Health on March 8 released data showing the confirmed number of active COVID-19 cases was 192,228. But that number could be as high as half a million, or even approaching a million, due to massive under-reporting, according to University of Otago public health expert Professor Nick Wilson.

The ministry's figure is probably three to five times less than the true number, he told The New Zealand Herald on March 8.

Wilson said self-reporting a positive rapid test result took some effort, and many people did not want to isolate if testing positive, so would not report.

"The media obsession with cases I just find inexplicable. People need to know that in this stage of the epidemic it's hospitalizations that are important," Wilson said.