That has been obvious on the campaign trail as some candidates reinvent pandemic history including, in some cases, their own original response to measures introduced to minimise spread of the illness here.
Last week, a New Zealand Medical Journal article by 16 scientists and doctors closely involved with the pandemic here concluded our response had been among the world’s most effective.
Across the world, in the last three years there have been about 29 million Covid-19 deaths.
More than 3000 New Zealanders have died from the disease, and it is expected to kill more than 1000 people this year.
During 2020 and 2021 when control measures were most stringent, and vaccination was at its highest, excess mortality declined here. (Excess mortality is the number of deaths from all causes beyond what we would have expected if there was no Covid-19 pandemic.)
Deaths increased last year with widespread circulation of the illness.
If our excess mortality rate matched the United States, for instance, we would have had about 19,030 excess deaths to the end of June this year, 16,410 if we were on a par with the United Kingdom and if we had Sweden’s experience, 7450 deaths.
The article also points out that our elimination strategy meant the stringency of control measures was also less than those used by other high-income countries which used suppression/mitigation approaches to the disease.
It can be hard to grasp what might have been. This may become more difficult as memories fade of terrifying scenes of overwhelmed hospitals overseas and Europe and initial fears about how long it could take to develop effective vaccines and medicines to curb the onslaught.
As lead author of the article University of Otago public health professor Michael Baker says, the strange paradox of preventative medicine is that its success can work against it in people’s minds.
He told RNZ of an adage in public health — "a public health triumph: nothing happened".
Regarding the pandemic, people might now ask what all the fuss was about.
Estimates about deaths avoided will not necessarily resonate with people who thought Auckland was locked down too long, whose lives were adversely affected in myriad ways during the pandemic response and who may be still suffering from the aftermath.
Nobody would argue that any country’s pandemic response was perfect.
Expecting all involved to always make the right call in the face of limited information was unreasonable.
That does not mean we should not methodically and critically examine what happened and whether we could do better in the future. That is the task of the Royal Commission of Inquiry (Covid-19 Lessons) which is expected to report back to the government next September.
The article’s authors see a need for an integrated respiratory infections disease surveillance and control strategy which would cover influenza, Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) and other important respiratory pathogens. This would include vaccinations, improving air quality and wearing masks in some settings.
And another thing
A national alert has been issued over a case of measles in someone who attended a week-long Shakespeare Schools Production at Scots College in Wellington with students from around the country. Measles is a highly contagious disease which can infect nine out of 10 of someone’s unvaccinated close contacts.
Before a measles vaccine became available in 1963 and was widely used, measles epidemics would occur every few years resulting in millions of deaths around the world.
We have known for years we are at risk of a major outbreak, given our stubbornly low vaccination rates for measles, including for under-5s who are particularly vulnerable to the disease.
Efforts to address this have been ineffective.
The last major outbreak in New Zealand in 2019 resulted in more than 700 hospital admissions and 2185 notified cases spread over 17 then district health board areas (including Southern).
Nobody wants a repeat, or worse, of that.
