We’re finally getting somewhere with Covid

• Published date: 06 November 2021

I say that tentatively, because the messages from the Beehive podium can change from one week to the next. It was only last week, when we were hearing about “traffic lights” for a vaccinated population, that the Prime Minister said previously announced “steps” out of level 3 would depend on case numbers.

She was answering a reporter’s question and must have given it more thought over last weekend, because on Monday, with the Delta outbreak setting new records for daily case numbers, she announced Waikato could go to step 2 on Wednesday and Auckland “in principle” next Wednesday.

Thank goodness for small mercies. Those centres of social life, shopping malls and suburban main streets, will be alive again in a few days. Summer sports may be seen in the parks. But the best news from the Beehive on Monday was the sight of the Prime Minister and the director general of health putting up charts of the numbers in hospital during this outbreak.

The lines on the screen showed hospitalisations rising much more gently, and at a much lower level than cases of infection that have been rising steadily since Auckland was released from Level 4 in September.

The divergence would not surprise anybody who has been watching the figures worldwide in this pandemic from the beginning. The virus started out with a mortality rate rising much more slowly than infections and the gulf widened as infections spread exponentially. But this was the first time I’d heard Jacinda Ardern call our attention to hospitalisation rates rather than case numbers.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield gave us the good news that the hospitalisation rate was projected to remain within the capacity of our hospitals, including their intensive care units, thanks to our now high level of vaccination.

Furthermore, he said, for many of those admitted to hospital with Covid-19 the disease was not their primary diagnosis. In plain language, there were worse things wrong with them. I think that is something we ought to have been told long ago. I was surprised the revelation did not interest the press conference.

In fact the thrust of nearly all the questions while I watched was on the fearful side of the decision to lower Auckland’s restrictions while the virus was spreading. Only Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper, bless him, asked why the city had to wait a week longer than Waikato...