After the initial success against Covid-19 in 2020, the Government never developed a backup strategy in the event that elimination failed, Marc Daalder reports
The Government never produced a strategy for handling Covid-19 in New Zealand if it failed to eliminate an outbreak, Newsroom can reveal.
In response to an Official Information Act request from Newsroom, Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins said his office held no information relating to a suppression strategy for Covid-19 or to any other strategy that wasn't an elimination strategy. The request sought documents relating to other Covid-19 response strategies between July 2, 2020, when Hipkins became Minister of Health, and September 20, 2021, when Auckland moved down to Level 3 during the Delta outbreak.
"After an extensive search through this office's records, I can confirm that there was no information provided to my office relating to any strategy that was not an elimination strategy during the period specified in your request," Hipkins wrote.
University of Otago epidemiologist Michael Baker said he was surprised to learn that the Government hadn't developed a backup plan.
"I would think it would have been sensible to have a range of alternative scenarios and plan accordingly," he told Newsroom.
"Once you had the Delta variant, it showed that viral evolution was going to continue and could result in big changes in the behaviour of the organism. All of the literature said this virus was going to be changing and I would have thought that, at the very least, you would want to have a plan after seeing what Delta was capable of."
National Party Covid-19 Response spokesperson Chris Bishop said the Government put all its eggs in one basket by planning only for elimination.
"The Government just bet the house on elimination and assumed it would work. Even after Delta arrived in MIQ in April and into the community in August, the Government just assumed it would work," he said.
"They really should have been working on backup plans. By the time Delta arrived in New Zealand and into the community, it had already spread to basically every other country."
In early August, officials had raised the challenges that Delta might present.
"As demonstrated in Australia, this new variant presents increased risk to the maintenance of our Elimination Strategy," they wrote in an August 5 weekly report to Hipkins.
"In order to maintain elimination, our response will need to be faster, possibly last for longer, employ more stringent public health measures than may have been previously used, and possibly use these more widely, including the use of Alert Level 4 restrictions if necessary," another briefing the next day reported.
Independent public health experts raised these concerns as early as June, when a man infected with the Delta variant visited Wellington from Sydney.
Even during the present Delta outbreak, however, officials didn't draw up a strategy for the event in which elimination wasn't attainable. On September 20, when Auckland moved down to Level 3, they were still confident that New Zealand would return to zero cases. Just two weeks later, they had given up that goal - but didn't know what strategy would replace it.
When dozens of scientific experts were called to a Zoom call on October 14 with the Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor Juliet Gerrard and with the Ministry of Health's science boss Ian Town, they were asked what strategy New Zealand should be implementing - despite the fact the Prime Minister had thrown in the towel on elimination 10 days earlier.
"That week seemed to be a communications disaster because they said we're transitioning away [from] elimination but didn't say to what," Baker said.
Bishop agreed: "If you look at the timeline of events, it's pretty clear that after elimination failed, they had to scramble to figure out what to do next."
"They were just slow. It's not just me who says that. Sir Brian [Roche] says the health system wasn't ready, Professor [David] Murdoch in relation to rapid antigen tests and saliva tests was critical."
Hipkins, in a statement to Newsroom, defended the Government's record.
"The Government’s plan was always to stamp out Covid-19. There was never any tolerance for the virus, for people to get sick or worse, like what was happening with the staggering case numbers overseas," he said.
"The shift from elimination to minimise and protect was timed to coincide with vaccination rates of around 90 per cent. Moving any earlier could have had far reaching consequences. Elimination bought us time to achieve this shift in the safest way possible."
The Ministry of Health did not respond to a request for comment.
