Via The Guardian: New Zealand braces for rising Covid cases as expert warns of potential explosion. Excerpt:
New Zealand is bracing for increasing numbers of Covid-19 cases after recording 94 new infections over the weekend, while pandemic modellers say that if the government stays its current course new cases will quickly top 100 a day.
“We are on the exponential growth curve,” an epidemiologist and public health professor, Michael Baker, said. “If you look at the trend, it’s clearly going up in Auckland, and it’s not just the total cases but also the unexplained cases, which suggests transmission in the community is increasing.”
Baker said that if the government kept its current restrictions, or loosened them further by reopening schools, as announced last week, “there’s only one way it can go and that’s up”.
“This is really simple. This is where every epidemiologist and disease modeller will agree 100%. Don’t do it.”
Case numbers began rising steadily soon after the government loosened restrictions in Auckland, the centre of the Delta outbreak, from a level 4 to level 3 lockdown. Cases have since spread beyond the city’s borders, cropping up in Northland and Waikato.
On Monday, the government announced another 35 cases, all in Auckland, taking the total number of cases in the outbreak to 1,622. According to the Ministry of Health, 29 of the previous day’s cases were infectious in the community, and 21 of the cases announced had not yet been linked to existing cases.
Last week, the government announced a new “steps” system for Auckland to reduce restrictions in the coming weeks, subject to case numbers: first allowing outdoor gatherings, then gradually reopening some schools and allowing retail and hospitality to restart.
Baker said that with Auckland’s outbreak growing, following those steps would be a mistake and could cause the outbreak to explode.
“You go down the alert level system when the outbreak is coming under control,” he said. “You don’t go down the system when the outbreak is increasing. This is basic infectious disease epidemiology.”
