COVID modelling

As everybody will know, the COVID pandemic is still here. This week we've seen the number of active cases continue to fall, and Auckland/Tāmaki Makaurau has moved down into alert level 3.

Professor Shaun Hendy, part of the team (pictured above) at Te Pūnaha Matatini ran the numbers on various levels of vaccination in the community. Even with 80% of the population aged over 5 fully vaccinated, we could expect up to 7,000 COVID deaths per year. If we can get the number to 90%, this would likely fall to 600 per year, and could effectively be as low as 50 with other health measures kept in place (such as masking in public spaces).

Naturally, these numbers didn't go down well with the crowd pushing to “open up” and “learn to live with COVID”.

Rodney Jones, an economist and modeller disputed the results on the basis that they didn't pass the “plausibility test” when we compare ourselves with other countries - citing that Singapore with a similar population size to our own and 80% vaccinated, had only had 11 deaths over the past month (whereas 7,000 per year amounts to around 580 per month).

The serious takeaway from this is that all countries are different and it's extremely difficult to compare one country with another. For example, in Singapore and other southeast Asian countries, wearing masks in public is a fairly normal thing to do after SARS. And our populations are vastly different in composition, and our health systems are vastly different - with Singapore's being variously rated (depending on what you're measuring) as the best in the world. Our health system is ranked well (somewhere around 20th in the world) but it's widely acknowledged that our system has ethnic identity as an important determiner of health outcomes.

Our privileged position that we've taken to keep COVID out of New Zealand has perhaps put us in a place where we don't directly experience its devastating effects. The reality is that we're still a long way from having a decent percentage of the population fully vaccinated. As I write this, just under 40% of the population over 12 has been fully vaccinated (myself included).