WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — In August, the New Zealand government put the entire nation on lockdown after a single case of the coronavirus was discovered in the community.
On Tuesday, as new daily cases hit a record close to 24,000, officials told hospital workers they could help in understaffed COVID-19 wards, even if they were mildly ill themselves.
It was the latest sign of how radically New Zealand’s approach to the virus has shifted, from elimination to suppression and now to something approaching acceptance now that the omicron variant has made its appearance.
Experts say New Zealand’s sometimes counterintuitive actions likely saved thousands of lives by allowing the nation to avoid earlier, more deadly variants and buy time to get people vaccinated. The country of 5 million has reported just 65 deaths from viruses since the start of the pandemic.
But virus hospitalizations have risen rapidly, reaching a record high of more than 750 on Tuesday and putting pressure on the system.
Across the country, the explosion has left people stunned in cases. Just a month ago, the number of files was around 200 per day. Now the outbreak affects everyone from frontline workers to lawmakers.
Opposition leader Christopher Luxon on Monday became the most prominent politician to date to announce he was infected, saying he was well and would continue to work from home.
One factor accelerating the outbreak was the return of thousands of college students to campuses across the country last month.
Ralph Zambrano, the student president at Victoria University of Wellington, said the virus had quickly spread to hundreds of students in residence halls, negatively impacting their mental health and well-being.
“Usually it’s bustling on campus at this time of year, but it has a really creepy feel to it,” he said, adding that most students chose to learn by distance. “There is a lot of fear and tension.”
He said the outbreak had strained the food supply system in the hallways, with some students only getting a protein drink for breakfast or a piece of cold meat and some peas for dinner.
The university said the number of cases in the halls was now decreasing as students recovered.
Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago, said the strain had proved just as ruthlessly contagious in New Zealand as it was in other countries.
He said cases in Auckland’s largest city appeared to be on the decline or even started to decline, while they were still increasing elsewhere.
While much of the world breathed a sigh of relief after two years of horrendous trouble, Baker said, New Zealand was at its worst point yet in the pandemic, coming to terms with the virus being permanently in the air. the country would remain.
He said he was concerned that health authorities had lost the ability to closely monitor the outbreak as they struggled to switch from a system of carefully monitoring a few cases to dealing with thousands of self-reported results of rapid antigen tests.
dr. Caroline McElnay, director of public health at the Department of Health, told reporters that hospital admissions would increase, but that patients with omicron generally had less severe illness than previous patients with the delta variant.
She said the rising number of both patients and healthcare workers infected had led to the relaxation of rules around when healthcare workers could return to hospitals.
She said infected workers should only be allowed to work with patients who already had the virus, and if there were no other options.
“It’s an additional tool that keeps our health system running,” she said.
