21 July, 2021, 5:10 pm
Police patrol the parameters of the Public Rental Board housing COVID 19 lockdown area at Natokowaqa settlement in Lautoka. Picture: REINAL CHAND
If you go for an early lockdown, you maximise your chances of getting rid of the COVID-19 outbreak, says specialist public health and infectious disease physician Professor Philip Hill.
“So you now have the Delta variant in Fiji, which is more transmissible than the original virus from Wuhan, and that makes it more important to be thinking about lockdowns,” he said during a recent Fiji National University virtual panel discussion on COVID-19.
“And what we’ve tended to find around the world is that if you don’t have good social distancing measures, which is now often a lot, you end up inevitably leading towards lockdown because of your overwhelmed health systems.
However, to date there had been no internationally agreed definition of that level for Covid-19. The authors say instead of “zero Covid”, elimination could be defined as achieving a “situation in which outbreaks of Covid-19 are extinguished eventually, with no continuing widespread transmission . England was in the process of abandoning “most efforts to control, let alone eliminate, the infection” but this “might drive the emergence of new variants that are resistant to current vaccines”.
Daniel Leal-Olivas/AP
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has lifted many restrictions despite rising coronavirus cases. Countries that allowed uncontrolled community transmission of Covid-19 could face significant seasonal burdens on their health system, and high-risk people may have to make major adjustments in winter months to reduce their chance of infection.
There were 2150 close contacts and 3775 casual plus contacts identified during the outbreak. The new contact categories were developed for “what boiled down to only two extra requirements”. The extra complexity for only two changes was “excessive”, the advisory group found. Individuals in an outbreak simply need to know if they are a close or casual contact and what, during that particular outbreak, is expected of them. While the new categories were supposed to increase clarity, “ironically, they facilitated blurring of the boundaries” between them, “increasing confusion” – such as when 1600 casual contacts were relabelled close contacts. At the time, the Ministry of Health said the additional classification of casual plus helps “provide flexibility in terms of the public health response to public exposure events as well as help standardise the approach for health services”.
Covid-19: Review of February cluster review finds Govt failed to learn lessons
Papatoetoe High School was at the centre of the Auckland February cluster. (Photo / File)
Covid-19: Review of February cluster review finds Govt failed to learn lessons Thu, 8 Jul 2021, 1:46PM
A review of the February Covid outbreak found a lack of coherency among central agencies, conflicting messaging that could undermine public confidence, and a Government that had failed to learn the lessons of past reviews.
The February review - by the independent advisory group chaired by Sir Brian Roche - also found a lack of stress-testing the system, and ongoing uncertainty about the system s ability to handle a large outbreak.