Trials of new technology that could help New Zealand fight Covid-19 have faltered in recent weeks, Marc Daalder reports
The Ministry of Health has failed to run effective trials of new Covid-19 testing technology at the border, critics say.
On Sunday, National Party Covid-19 Response spokesperson Chris Bishop revealed that a voluntary rollout of saliva-based testing of border workers had seen just 339 saliva tests performed since it began in January.
"Public health experts have recommended introducing regular saliva testing across our border workforce, but the Government has been very slow to act," Bishop said.
Now, the Ministry of Health has confirmed to Newsroom that a trial of another technology to detect Covid-19, the ëlarm app, has similarly foundered. Health officials dodged questions about how many border workers had signed up to the voluntary trial, but said it wasn't enough to gain any useful data.
"There has been a low initial take-up of the trial," a ministry spokesperson said. Up to 500 border workers could sign up to test the technology, which uses an app and a fitness tracker to detect early warning signs of Covid-19.
"The trial will stay open until enough people have taken part to provide a useful set of data for analysis, which might be for a number of months."
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said the issue was an operational one for the ministry to sort out, but warned against providing incentives for people to sign up.
"It could mean the Ministry ends up with people who may not need to participate, and trial results don’t then match up with results down the track," he said.
ACT Party leader David Seymour, who has pushed the Government to adopt the ëlarm technology since June last year, said the ministry's approach to these trials seemed disingenuous.
"Given the near absence of Covid-19 from the New Zealand environment, I suspect even 500 would not be a large enough sample to test whether it detects people [with Covid-19]. All of which leads to the question: What is the purpose of the trial? If it's to discover whether it works, they need to do it much bigger and much more robustly," he said.
"And if it's not to discover it works, then either they believe it does or it doesn't already. If they don't believe it works, they shouldn't be doing anything. And if they do believe it works, based on offshore data, then they should be rolling it out comprehensively and making it a condition of employment because it could well detect an outbreak and save the country billions of dollars."
The Ministry of Health spokesperson insisted the Government was genuinely investigating the usefulness of ëlarm.
"We want to determine if the ëlarm app is a useful addition to the Covid-19 toolbox. Even though our border workers are vaccinated, it’s important they have good tools to keep themselves and their whānau healthy."
Seymour said the Government was reluctant to try out new approaches.
"The Government's made a fundamental error in that they have banked the success of our Covid response, without acknowledging that they had an easier job in terms of geographic isolation, demographics, population density, just about everything. We're a sophisticated first-world country with no corruption and high observance of rule-of-law," he said.
"They've banked all of that and decided that the success is theirs. I think that's made them complacent in a number of ways. One is that there's no sense of urgency. They are reticent, if not hostile, to adopting new technologies and they're very resistant to working with people outside of the public sector.
"Given their reticence and hostility to new technologies - in the form of CovidCard and saliva testing, for example - you have to wonder if this is not designed to kill it. Why they're doing a voluntary trial of 500 people - it feels like they're either completely incompetent or they're deliberately trying to kill it."
