Māori currently have the highest rate of Covid-19 cases in New Zealand and hospitalisation rates amongst whānau are on the rise.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the Director-General of Health, shared the bleak figures during Thursday’s 1pm media conference.
Bloomfield said the Pacific rate was previously the highest but it had since dropped.
“From an ethnicities perspective, Maori currently have the highest rate at 35 (cases) per 1000, then Pacific and their rate is 28 per 1000,” he said.
Tairāwhiti has the most cases amongst Māori at around 112 cases per 1000, then Hutt Valley DHB, followed by Hawke’s Bay and Bay of Plenty. Bloomfield said case numbers were increasing for Māori in “most other DHBs” across the country.
There had been a decrease in the number of cases amongst Māori for the week to March 20, where there were just over 27,000 cases as opposed to around 30,500 cases the week prior.
But Māori hospitalisations are on the rise.
“Despite that drop in case numbers, there’s been an increase during that week in the number of Māori who were hospitalised. There was 232 in that week to the 20th of March,” Bloomfield said.
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John Whaanga, Deputy Director-General for Māori Health joined Bloomfield for Thursday’s announcement to speak to the government’s Māori Covid-19 response.
He said the Ministry of Health was continuing to work closely with Māori health providers, DHBs and iwi to increase vaccinations, especially among tamariki.
Nearly $27 million has been allocated under the Māori and Pacific Omicron response package.
Whaanga was also asked by a reporter if he was concerned the Government’s changes to Covid restrictions would disproportionately impact Māori,, to which he said the decisions were “very clearly based on science”.
“So we have confidence that off the back of that advice that the settings we’re moving to are going to enable us to move to an environment which is a bit different from where we’ve been in the past, but still have the relevant protection measures in place to protect our people.”
The Government announced changes to its Covid-19 framework on Wednesday which sees gathering restrictions on outdoor settings lifted, vaccine passes scrapped and vaccine mandates for some workforces removed.
The Green Party yesterday announced it didn’t support the changes being made to the Covid-19 framework, and that the Government was putting vulnerable communities at risk, including Māori and Pasifika whānau.
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