Covid-19 elimination strategy not sustainable - virus expert

June 28, 2021

Dr Amesh Adalja is urging countries to focus on vaccinating, saying the world will still see coronavirus cases in five years.

A Covid-19 expert says New Zealand and Australia need to ramp up vaccinating vulnerable populations because an elimination or eradication strategy for the virus is not sustainable.

It comes as a new, more contagious strain of the virus - the Delta variant - is currently threatening Australia.

As well, Wellington remains in Alert Level 2 while tests come in as to whether a Sydney traveller with the Delta variant spread the illness during a visit to the capital just over a week ago.

However, Dr Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, this morning told Breakfast Covid-19 isn't going away anytime soon so it's time for risk analysis and for our nations ramp up vaccinating efforts.

"Countries like Australia and New Zealand, the way out of this for them to get more vaccine into high-risk individuals so this becomes a more manageable infectious disease and I don't think taking this route of elimination or eradication is sustainable or the right way to do it," he said.

"You have to remember that Covid-19 is not going to go anywhere. We're going to have Covid-19 cases five years from now. This is going to become an endemic respiratory virus, but one that's lost the ability to cause serious disease, hospitalisations and deaths at a high rate because high risk individuals are vaccinated.

"But if you haven't vaccinated that proportion of your population because you think you've eliminated community transmission you're going to have a hard time moving forward."

Yesterday, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins was asked if he believes New Zealand's alert level system is up to date.

"We keep them under review. If you look at mask wearing for example, it wasn't embedded in the alert system at all and now very much is. We've been able to make some pragmatic decisions and what you can and can't do under the levels and understand risks a lot more now.

"We would disagree with Michael Baker, I think he would prefer to see a seven plus alert system which I think would be much more difficult for New Zealanders to follow. There is real value in our current system because it is simple and New Zealanders know how to follow it by now.

"I wouldn't rule out changes but we do make variations such as Level 2.5 which took us a long time to identify the rules around them."

However, Adalja gave an example by saying the United States' handling of Covid-19 was bad early on, but the nation "got it right" by focussing vaccination efforts among high-risk populations.

"Now we've got a much more manageable infection and we've basically saved our hospitals from ever going into crisis again because all of our elderly populations, our nursing populations have been vaccinated."

He said fighting the coronavirus was not about managing risks.

Woman wearing face mask on bus.

"This is going to be one of our seasonal coronaviruses, there are four other coronaviruses that cause about 25 per cent of our common colds, SARS-CoV-2 is likely to become the fifth - it's not going to go away, it's established in the human population ... this is a new virus that's made its way into humans, it's not going magically back into bats."

But why is the Delta variant of Covid-19 more of a concern?

"What's special about Delta variant is that it seems to have acquired a host of mutations that makes it the most contagious version of SARS-CoV-2, the cause of Covid-19 the we've seen, it's more contagious than the original version of this virus and it's more contagious than the Alpha variant which was discovered in the UK that rose to be the world dominant strain," Adalja said.

"This is something that can really take hold in unvaccinated populations and can spread very quickly. In a country like Australia, it does not have a huge proportion of their population fully vaccinated so this can be very alarming to them because it will spread in that population."

When asked how New Zealand would respond to an outbreak of the Delta variant here, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said there hadn't been modelling on if Level 3 would be enough to contain it.

"I dare say the same principles apply and that is to move swiftly," he said.

"It's the early actions and movement that is the most important and remembering that our February experience here that we had potential locations that could spread it easily, and that was when we had the Alpha variant which at the time was more transmissible."

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