Microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles says the transmissibility of the new UK variant of Covid-19 is “frightening” after three members of a South Auckland family tested positive for the new strain, prompting a change in alert levels.
Wiles said the contagiousness of the new strain is what people should fear rather than “being afraid of the deadliness of it”, which has not been confirmed, Wiles said.
“What we absolutely know is it’s more infectious,” she said.
“More people have become affected, more cases from a primary case, possibly even faster. Some transmission chains happen within a few days. It’s quite frightening.
“The UK government did recently receive a report to say that it might be that more people are needing to be hospitalised, perhaps even dying.
“With the way cases are in the UK with a very stretched, almost a breaking hospital system, it’s hard to say whether that’s actually true or not.”
Wiles told Breakfast this morning she was confident that this latest cluster would be stamped out after Auckland was moved to Alert Level 3 overnight, with the rest of NZ moving to level 2.
“Certainly, we will contain the cluster, that’s our modus operandi in New Zealand,” she said.
The latest outbreak is another opportunity to learn and improve the system in Aotearoa, Wiles said.
“Every time we have an incursion, it’s an opportunity to learn how to make the system better, because we know we’re going to need the system for a while,” she said.
“Measures that we had in place were not quite good enough.”
Wiles says Kiwis should also remember how much of a contribution New Zealand is making to global understanding of the virus.
“Did it come from laundry? There aren’t many documented cases around the world of it happening from these fomites, these inanimate objects that might have the virus.
“That’s partly because in other countries, they can’t even get to that level of who got what.”
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