When comparing the timeline of New Zealand’s Delta outbreak to Victoria’s, Aotearoa is now at the same point that cases started to spike in the Australian state.
Tony Blakely, a Kiwi epidemiologist at the University of Melbourne, told 1News New Zealand could learn from Victoria’s experience.
“We’ve also learnt to live with it because of increasing vaccination coverage,” Blakely said of Delta’s spread in Melbourne.
He said once Delta was in a location, it would be “very hard” to get it out.
“This may sound a little bit controversial - but next year we do want to have 90 to 95 per cent vaccine coverage to make life as good as possible,” Blakely said.
“But, on the way there, we can still open up a little bit at lower vaccine coverage by going cautiously and as long as we’re prepared to allow the case numbers to go up to something that our health system can comfortably manage.
“Comfortable is probably overstating it, but you get my point - you can manage within that.”
As for his advice to the Government, Blakely said it was about finding activities for people to do that would not cause “too much trouble”.
For example, that could mean slowing allowing fully vaccinated people out to do more activities once 70 per cent of the eligible population was fully vaccinated against Covid-19, he said.
“All the time, you’re making sure your case numbers are under control and you hit the brakes and you pause if those case numbers are going up and looking like they’ll threaten health services with too many hospitalisations.”
Victoria on Thursday recorded 2297 new community Covid-19 cases and 11 deaths from the virus.
Premier Daniel Andrews said he was still committed to easing some restrictions next week once 70 per cent of people over the age of 16 were fully vaccinated.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had signalled since September that Aotearoa would eventually transition away from elimination to reflect higher vaccination rates.
However, there continue to be disparities in the vaccine rollout among different parts of the population, such as for Māori and people with a disability .
There continue to be calls that the Government release the advice it got when it decided to allow Auckland to have extra freedoms under Alert Level 3.
Health Minister Andrew Little on Thursday said the hospital system was prepared to handle Covid-19 cases.
That's despite concerns from ICU specialists .
The Health Minister said talk of ICUs being at near full capacity are not true. (Source: Other)
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