'We've moved well past the elimination strategy that we had for the better part of two years. 'We're in a very different space when it comes to Covid-19 now,' he said. Aucklanders paid a big price for our ongoing suppression of Delta while we got our vaccination rates up.'Īuckland spent more than 100 days in lockdown starting in August 2021.Īs Hipkins prepares to take on his new role as Police Minister and hands the Covid-19 portfolio to Dr Ayesha Verrall, he said that the role was now primarily a health system response rather than involving lockdown and border controls. I think nerves were pretty frayed by that and we should acknowledge that. 'I think that lockdown in Auckland at the end of 2021. 'I think there were probably some areas where we could have moved more quickly to step down some restrictions,' he said. Hipkins told Q+A that some restrictions may have gone on too long. 'I think we can be really proud of what we've achieved as a country.'īut Hipkins said it was always going to be hard once Covid-19 was in the community and the borders began reopening.Īsked if he had regrets, Hipkins said it is easy to look back with the knowledge we have now, but 'you still have to make decisions based on the information that you had at the time.' As lockdown measures begin to relax in countries that are still battling the coronavirus, experts predict the possibilities of a second wave of infections. 'Japan and New Zealand right at the bottom of the table there.' 'We've had the lowest mortality rate in the OECD,' he said. Hipkins said he was proud of the overall results that New Zealand achieved compared to other countries. In an interview with TVNZ's Q+A on Sunday, Hipkins reflected on the frenetic two years he spent as Covid-19 response minister. The researchers say their findings indicate the urgency of developing mechanisms for rapid response to disease outbreaks, building capacity for pandemic surveillance, strengthening health systems and boosting research into understanding why large outbreaks are becoming more common.Former Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins. This is of great concern given how the planet was left reeling from the shock of COVID-19 – and much of the world is yet to recover. The data suggests that the annual probability of extreme epidemics occurring could also increase threefold in the coming decades. A study in Nature Climate Change showed that over half of infectious diseases have been aggravated by climate change. Global warming can alter animal habitats, bringing them more into contact with people and increasing the risk of zoonotic diseases, as well as changing the transmission dynamics of mosquito-borne diseases. The researchers found that there has been a significant increase in the rate of outbreaks emerging each year during 1940 to 2000, which seems largely to be a result of climate change. How bad will climate change be for our health?.Under Climate Change, Care Workers Often Act as First Responders.Over half of infectious diseases made worse by climate change.One can get another 100-year flood the next year.” “When a 100-year flood occurs today, one may erroneously presume that one can afford to wait another 100 years before experiencing another such event,” Katul said. However, Gabriel Katul, Professor of Hydrology and Micrometeorology at Duke University and one of the paper’s authors, points out that it’s important to understand what probability really means.

The statistics indicate that it’s highly likely we will see an extreme pandemic like that within the next 400 years. One of the most extreme events in the past couple of centuries was the 1918 H1N1 flu pandemic, which killed 30 million people between 19. This means that the probability of experiencing a pandemic similar to COVID-19 in one’s lifetime is about 38%. The researchers found that the probability of a pandemic with a similar impact to COVID-19 is about 2% in any year. It’s true that this was probably the first time that most of the world experienced strict lockdowns, mobility restrictions and quarantines at the same time, but in just the past few decades we have seen similar measures undertaken regionally, for instance with the SARS outbreak in 2003.Ī new analysis of novel disease outbreaks of infectious illnesses such as cholera, influenza and typhoid over the past 400 years in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that statistically extreme events are not as rare as we may think. Now the statistics seem to show that not only are pandemics likely to happen, the probability of one is only going to rise. But scientists have long been warning of such an event. For many of us since the COVID-19 pandemic started, life may feel forever segmented into before and after the cataclysmic event that has meant nothing will ever be the same again.

Could there be a second lockdown