The number of Covid-19 patients in hospital and the number of new ones admitted daily are the key numbers to watch over the next 10 days, Marc Daalder reports
The Prime Minister's decision to keep all of New Zealand at the red setting will have surprised most commentators – and those in Auckland most of all.
After months of lockdown and facing the brunt of the Omicron wave before anywhere else in the country, Aucklanders now enjoy New Zealand's lowest Covid-19 case rates. Fewer than one in every 100 Aucklanders is considered an active case of the virus, compared to one in 54 nationwide.
The number of people in hospital with Covid-19 has also fallen in Auckland, down from around 600 two weeks ago to just 350 on Monday.
It seemed a no-brainer to move the region, as well as perhaps a few others, to the orange setting. While relatively little changes beyond the lifting of indoor gathering caps, businesses are hoping that moving down the traffic lights could flag to customers that it's safe to go out.
Instead, all of New Zealand will remain at red until at least April 14. That's when another review is due, right before Easter and the school holidays.
Jacinda Ardern said the decision came as a result of the ongoing pressure on the hospital system. Auckland serves as an important backup for regional hospitals that are overwhelmed, so extra care needs to go into protecting the health system in the city.
"Public health advice tells us now is not the time to ease the existing restrictions and drop down to orange. We're doing well, but we're still in a large Omicron outbreak in New Zealand, and while we're moving in the right direction, we're not out of the woods yet," she said.
Ardern told reporters the Government could well lift restrictions in Auckland next week and that they wouldn't have set the early review date if it wasn't on the table.
So, what actually needs to happen to get to orange? Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield said there was no magic number, but that the trend needed to be a fall in hospitalisations.
He also revealed the Government isn't just looking at the number of people in hospital on any given day, but also how many new admissions there are. This gives a better, real-time view of the hospital situation. As it stands, the length of stay in hospital is getting longer, meaning that a flattening in hospitalisation figures could occur even if the number of people entering hospital each day continues to drop.
In the 23 days since the average daily case count peaked at 20,790, the average has fallen 36 percent. But in the 23 days before the peak, cases increased by nearly 20 times. In other words, we're coming down the peak much more slowly than we went up.
It's unclear whether that will translate to a slowing in the decline in hospital numbers, which so far have almost mirrored the ascent after a long, flat peak.
But a move to orange anywhere in the country could depend on hospitalisations and hospital admissions continuing to fall. Right now, they're still above the estimated peak in hospitalisations in a "medium" transmission scenario, modelled before the outbreak got into gear nationwide. We've instead seen a "high" or even perhaps a "very high" transmission scenario – the latter was never modelled.
Officials will also be looking beneath the national numbers, to see how each part of the country is handling the outbreak. That could inform a decision to keep part of New Zealand in red and move other regions to orange. Alternatively, if particularly vulnerable areas are seeing a sustained peak in disease burden or if outbreaks are just revving up in parts of the country, officials could decide the health system in Auckland needs to be protected so it can help out struggling regions.
The picture also isn't perfectly rosy in Auckland, Bloomfield cautioned.
"You've got to remember, Auckland, yes the case numbers are coming down but there's still several thousand cases a day," he said.
"Nearly half the national hospital admissions are in Auckland – 351 today across the Auckland metro hospitals. That peak is higher than might have been modelled and is prolonged, so there's quite a long tail of people in hospital."
In other words, despite putting a review on the table in 10 days' time, there's no guarantee Auckland or any other part of the country will move to orange.
