First Up Elimination Debate: do we keep locking down?
71 per cent of New Zealanders have had their First dose of the Pfizer vaccine, with just over half of those people having also had their second dose. At the rate the country is going, it won't be long before the vast majority of us have been fully vaccinated against Covid-19, meaning the impact the virus has on health will be far less severe ... and its transmissibility greatly reduced. So what happens after we reach our vaccination milestone? Do we leave our borders closed, and continue with the lockdown strategy if cases appear in the community? Or does the protection we've been afforded by the vaccine mean we should open up to the world and accept that Covid is here to stay? Someone who takes the latter view is Amesh Adalja, an infectious diseases expert and senior scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Health Security, based in Baltimore in the United States. This morning in a special First Up extended discussion, we speak with Dr Adalja AND our own Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist at the University of Otago's Department of Public Health. Dr Baker has been at the centre of New Zealand's response to the pandemic and says that the country's strategy of locking down early to prevent the virus spreading through the community has served us very well indeed.. But let's begin with Dr Adalja's assertion that lockdowns are an excessive response at this stage of the pandemic. Do we, then, need to accept that who-knows-how-many New Zealanders will need to die in order to avoid the inconvenience of further lockdowns?
