Ministerial Statements — COVID-19—Alert Level Changes

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Since the House last met, Auckland has once again been through the arduous ordeal of a lockdown, and New Zealanders have been reminded of the need for continued vigilance in responding to COVID-19.

On Saturday, 27 February, a new case emerged which could not be immediately linked to the previous cases in the Auckland February cluster. We found ourselves in a position that was fairly clear-cut: there was no immediate link for the new case, and, even if there had been, a large number of exposure events associated with the latest case posed a significant risk of spread. This led Ministers to take the cautious approach which has served New Zealand so well through the pandemic and move Auckland to alert level 3 and the rest of New Zealand to alert level 2. Over the past week, our systems have once again been put to the test. I’m pleased to say that they have demonstrated their overall strength.

By Friday afternoon, six days after identifying the new case, over 60,000 COVID-19 tests had been carried out—a significant proportion of those in Auckland—and 77 percent of the population of the Counties Manukau DHB have been tested. Our contact tracing team identified and managed roughly 6,000 contacts linked to the 15 cases. We were able to genomically link cases to give us confidence that we were dealing with a contained cluster, and we carried out regular wastewater testing at key sites, the results of which have all been negative, with the exception of the site near Jet Park, where we’re currently quarantining people who have COVID-19, and we would expect to see positive results from that.

That’s a massive credit to our testing teams and our contact tracing teams, and should provide the public with confidence that our systems are well placed to assist in the future if further cases were to arise. On the basis of this hard mahi and the fact that we found no new cases beyond household members, by Friday, Cabinet was confident to move Auckland to alert level 2 and the rest of New Zealand to alert level 1 from Sunday morning. We also agreed to meet again later this week, with a view to moving Auckland back to alert level 1 on Saturday if evidence suggests that it is safe to do so. This plan is consistent with our elimination strategy.

I am pleased to report the Government is also making good progress with the roll-out of our vaccine. Border workers and their household contacts are receiving their first doses of the Pfizer vaccine: a vaccine that is now a much greater reality for many more New Zealanders with the announcement we’ve secured an additional 8.5 million doses within our portfolio. While a vaccine does signal a promising light at the end of this very long tunnel, it remains vital that everyone continues to stringently follow the public health messages, which is continuing to keep your distance from people when out and about in public. And on public transport, if you can’t maintain that distance of 2 metres, we encourage you to carry a facemask or face covering with you. If you are sick, stay at home—don’t go to work or school and don’t socialise. This protects you and it protects others. If you have symptoms of a cold or flu nature, if you’ve got aches or pains, call your doctor or Healthline and arrange to get a test. And please, to everybody, keep track of your movements at all times.

Moving down alert levels should not result in an increase in complacency. Indeed, with increased freedom comes increased responsibility—I know that our team of 5 million is up to that. We have the fourth lowest number of stay-at-home days of all OECD countries and the lowest average rating of OECD countries on the Oxford stringency index, meaning, on average, over the last year, we’ve had the fewest restrictions and the most freedoms of any country in the OECD. We all need to remain vigilant and to keep up that good work so that we can all continue to enjoy that.

Before I call a member, I think there might have been a slight communications failure, but the only people who are allowed in the Speaker’s gallery are members of Parliament or those people who are in there for security purposes. There are at least three people who I can see there who are not members of Parliament or there for those purposes—could I ask you to go to the other galleries, thank you.

I might have very poor eyesight, but I think there are at least two more people up there who are in neither of those categories.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank the Minister for his statement. This was New Zealand’s first yo-yo lockdown when we went up to level 3 in Auckland, back down again, and then back up, all linked to the same cluster. So in light of that, it’s important we get to the bottom of what happened and learn those lessons. We on this side of the House have called for an inquiry, and I note the Government’s announcement of another group chaired by Sir Brian Roche to consider the events of the recent month, and we welcome that announcement.

I do have a question for the Minister, though, to start things off—I have several, but to start things off—on whether or not he can update the House on the original source of the Valentine’s Day cluster and how the investigations are going into that. In particular, is there any clarity on whether it is linked to the case at managed isolation and quarantine, at the Four Points by Sheraton, as he signalled was possible a couple of weeks ago?

With regard to the last part of the member’s question, no link has been established with that case at the Four Points. It’s important to note that whilst genome sequencing can reveal that cases are similar, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they come from the same place. So no clear link has been established there.

In terms of the overall source investigation, this may well be one of those cases where we never quite get to the bottom of exactly what happened here. We weren’t able to identify clearly the source of the Americold case which triggered the Auckland outbreak back in August, and it may well be that this is a similar situation. When in doubt, though, there are some more likely scenarios than others, and of course we do have a border worker who was involved here, and so that continues to be one of the more likely of a series of unlikely potential scenarios.

Well, just as a follow-up to that, is the Government considering, then, bringing this particular border worker that possibly could be the original source infection—bringing them within the overall ambit of the testing regime?

Yes, we absolutely will be doing that. I have just completed a review that we had already started before this most recent group of cases, of looking at that group that’s on the periphery of the border to make sure that everybody was captured that needed to be captured. So someone in the laundry, for example, when we did the initial risk assessment, wouldn’t necessarily have been captured by that initial risk assessment. We’ve learnt a lot more in the six months or so since that first testing order was put in place, and as a result we have made additional changes.

One of the key challenges with that is around the handling of goods that come across the border, because not everybody who handles goods that come across the border—and there are many, many, many thousands of people in that category—is going to be at risk, but there are still some who could be at risk. So making sure that we’re narrowing that down so that we’re dealing with the risk but not capturing people who we hadn’t intended to capture has been one of the challenges.

We described the decision to go from level 3 in Auckland to level 2 the first time as ambitious, and the reason we did that is that at that time we still didn’t know the source of the source infection, which we still don’t know. There were two new community cases that day and, critically, there were 363 students yet to return a negative COVID test. So my question for the Minister is—and it’s an important one in light of what’s going on potentially with travel bubbles with Australia and the Cook Islands—is the Government changing its general approach to risk? Does it continue to have a zero tolerance approach to community transmission, or has there been a slight loosening of the level of cases in the community that the Government and the country are prepared to tolerate?

There hasn’t been a change to our appetite for risk, if you like. We’re still pursuing an elimination strategy. What there is is more confidence in our contact tracing systems. We have seen other examples over the last six months where we’ve dealt very successfully with cases without the need to escalate alert levels. There were some additional factors around this one—including not knowing the source and, more latterly, in terms of the second lockdown, there being some undisclosed contacts, which meant that there were a greater number of cases than would have otherwise been the case—that made this one a little bit different.

Just in light of that comment around having more confidence in contact tracing systems, why did the Government fail two of the critical contact tracing metrics recommended by Dr Ayesha Verrall last year? I refer the Minister to metrics S001 and S002, which has been described as critical, and in the case of the Papatoetoe cluster the results were not good. S001, for members, is about the time from exposure to contact, isolation, and quarantine. The target is more than 80 percent within 96 hours. The achievement was 67 percent for Māori and 52 percent for non-Māori. S002 is about the time from case first symptom to contact, isolation, and quarantine. Again, the target’s more than 80 percent within 96 hours, and the achievement for this cluster was 75 percent for Māori and 62 percent for non-Māori. So the question for the Minister is: is he satisfied with those results, and what’s being done to improve them?

I’m not satisfied with those results. I think it’s important to acknowledge, though, in both of those metrics, that not all of that is within the control of the contact tracing teams, because the ability to meet those targets really depends on being made aware of cases at the earliest possible opportunity. So if you think about the second metric that the member mentioned, the time between showing symptoms to a person being quarantined or isolated, that very much depends on people coming forward as soon as they show symptoms. In this particular set of cases, particularly the ones that we have dealt with most recently, there was evidence that people were showing symptoms for some time before they came forward and before they got tested, and therefore before they were identified. So those metrics would be thrown out. Similarly, with regard to the first one, we had examples there where people were not necessarily identified early enough in order to meet that first one. So that’s one of the challenges.

We are—with the review panel that I have announced today—going to be having another look at what the most appropriate metrics are, and I’ve had conversations with Dr Verrall already, because those metrics are very much designed for a system where there was transmission within the community. It was designed in a different context to the one that we’re dealing with now. Now we’re dealing primarily with cases that come through the border, and so we’ve got to have another look at whether those metrics are the most appropriate, because cases that come through the border, for example, they’ve often been infected well before they even arrive in New Zealand, before we could even hope to test them, and therefore the metrics would not accommodate that.

The Minister makes a good point, I think, around the right communication going to people as to what they should do when they become symptomatic and what they should do around testing. That, I think, has been one of the things that many in the public have been alarmed about in the last two or so weeks, with the communication that has come from the Prime Minister down, in fairness, to the public around what the right messages are and what people should be doing. So I guess the question for the Minister is does he, on behalf of the Government, accept some responsibility for confusing messages around what people should and shouldn’t be doing, in particular in relation to the case of the KFC worker who we had the unedifying spectacle of the Prime Minister saying the judgment of the whole nation had to come down on that person—

💬 Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: That is not what I said about them—not about them.

Well that is what you said, when—

💬 SPEAKER: Order!

—that person insists, to this day, that they simply followed Government instructions.

I think this was well canvassed last week, and my view is very similar to the Prime Minister’s, which is that there was certainly enough information that that person should have known that they needed to be at home, including the fact that they had been asked to be tested and hadn’t been, and that they had two members of their household who were showing COVID-19 symptoms, who had also been asked to be tested. There was a lot of communication from the school. One of the things the review team will look at—and the Ministry of Health are already looking at this as part of their own debriefing process—is whether having additional categories of contact added to confusion. The key message overall here needs to be that people should follow the advice that is given to them by public health officials because it will be different depending on people’s individual circumstances. So, yes, there will be broad advice that’s issued to everybody, but where people are contacted by public health then they should follow the advice that they are given specifically by public health. That would certainly be aided if they responded to messages that they get from public health.

Thank you. I want to ask the Minister around the legal regime and self-isolation and testing. Dr Bloomfield says that medical officers of health have delegated authority from him and that orders to self-isolate and get tested are within the parameters of section 70 of the Health Act—that was at the press conference last week. Dr Andrew Geddis from the University of Otago has cast doubt on that proposition. We’re told that a section 70 order was formally issued last week, but was publicly unavailable for quite some time, and then we had Dr Bloomfield at the press conference in which the decision was made to go from level 3 in Auckland to level 2, again, actually formally issuing a formal section 70 order orally and then it was subsequently uploaded to the website, which I suppose makes people wonder why that had to happen in the first place, later on, if the section 70 orders were made orally by medical officers of health in the first place. So two questions, firstly—

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! The member’s time has expired.

Just very briefly responding to that, the member is, to some extent, asking for a legal opinion, and I best not venture into that territory. But what I would say is the advice that I have received is that a medical officer of health can give an order verbally, and somebody needs to follow that. So that is an enforceable order if it is given verbally.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’d like to start by congratulating the Minister on securing the 8 million Pfizer vaccines that he mentioned in his statement. I think that offers a great deal of reassurance to the country that the light is indeed at the end of the tunnel. I also want to say congratulations, Minister, on securing the Pfizer vaccine as opposed to some of the others on the market, because, apparently, the evidence shows that it’s about 95 percent effective versus 65 percent for some of the competing products. So I think that is very reassuring.

Now that those have been secured, can the Minister tell the House anything about the way in which the roll-out is going to occur for those vaccines and, in particular, looking at regimes similar to where they have in Australia, where people kind of pre-qualify and are told which group they’re in and are told, roughly, when that’s going to happen, and have the kind of assurance that comes from knowing when it is that you’re going to be receiving the vaccine?

The Government’s already released the sequencing framework for the first group of people who are going to be getting the COVID-19 Pfizer vaccine in the first quarter of this year. That work is already under way. So it starts with our border workers, first and foremost. We’re sitting somewhere about 90 percent of the way through doing that, having had the absolute latest numbers based on today’s experiences. But, certainly, we’re about 90 percent of the way through that, and we’ve made a start on their family and close contacts—you know, the household contacts of those people—and also on some of our front-line health workers. So the people who are involved in taking COVID-19 test swabs—those who are more at risk because they’re on the front lines of the health services. So that’s going to take us through the first quarter. We then start to move into the second quarter, where we’re expecting a roughly equivalent number of people to be vaccinated—so around about another quarter of a million people in the second quarter. Then we’ll get to the big roll-out in the second half of the year, and we’re expecting that to be spread right the way through the second half of the year. There’ll be surge points, no doubt, but we’re expecting the overall demand—we will have to manage the demand relatively smoothly through the second half of the year. We’ll be releasing details of that tomorrow. One of the reasons that we have not released that prior to now is the decision about which vaccine we used, and whether we used one vaccine or four different vaccines actually has an impact on the overall sequencing framework.

Thank you. In the Australian system, people go on to a website, fill out a few basic questions, it takes a very little time, and then they’re told which of, basically, five groupings they will be in, right at the very beginning of the process, and what that is able to do is to provide people with a sense of the time frame for themselves. Does the Government have any plans to replicate a similar system here in Aotearoa?

It’s a relatively simple and proved tool that they have, and we could easily do something here in New Zealand as well, or people could look at the list. The list is actually a relatively simple list, and it will show people exactly where they are at in the sequencing framework and broad timetable. Just to run through the numbers: about a quarter of a million courses of the vaccine in the first quarter of the year, about a quarter of a million courses of the vaccine—so that’s the two doses—in the second, and then we move later on in the year to the big roll-out in the second part of the year.

So will the schedule that gets published prioritise, for example, people who are immuno-compromised, people who live in overcrowded conditions or who have precarious jobs where they’re reluctant to get tested and take time off because they’re worried about loss of income, and so on?

So I can assure the member that all of those things were considered in the sequencing framework, and when we release that tomorrow, he will see that all of those factors have been built in to the sequencing framework.

Well, thank you, Mr Speaker. I speak on behalf of ACT in response to the ministerial statement. I think it is worth acknowledging some of the pain that has been caused to people by this lockdown. That is not to say that the lockdown is necessarily wrong—they might be prepared to accept those costs as the price of maintaining elimination—but it’s worth putting on record the businesses who have gone under this time, because the effects of our restrictions are cumulative.

It’s worth putting on record a message I got from the principal of a local school: “Pretty dispiriting for kids with camps, sports, etc., cancelled. Lots of schools pulling out of Polyfest. It’s not worth the risk. I don’t think the rest of the country realise or cares about the effect this is having on our youth. Anyway, keep fighting the good fight.” That’s a principal from the Epsom electorate.

I think it’s worth putting those on record and acknowledging that people who may have lost their businesses, missed healthcare, been dispirited by the restrictions actually probably think it’s acceptable if the Government is truly doing a good job of managing COVID-19. But the Minister told us that we should be grateful because we’ve had low levels of restriction and, according to the Oxford stringency index, low levels of restrictions on our freedoms within New Zealand. And the Minister is right about that, but I put it back to the Minister that this country has few peers that can compare to the natural advantages we have when it comes to fighting COVID. There’s a few countries that are more isolated than New Zealand—one or two. There’s a few that have a more spread out and younger population than New Zealand—one or two. And there’s a few countries that are richer than us and have a richer civil society and more cooperative people. But I’d challenge the Minister to name one country that could match the suite of advantages that New Zealand had going into the COVID-19 pandemic. If he could answer that, I’m sure we’d all love to know.

I think the member, to some extent, in his comments around freedoms, highlighted how fortunate New Zealanders have been. When it comes to things like school camps, festivals and events, and so on, we’re one of the only countries in the world that’s doing those things at the moment. We’re one of the only countries in the world that actually has an events industry thriving at the moment. While I’m not saying that it’s not challenging for them—it absolutely is—they are certainly doing a lot better than their counterparts in just about every other country around the world.

In terms of the comparisons that the member makes to other countries, I would simply point out to him that he is wrong, that it is an insult to the people working at our border that he’s putting it all down to the fact that we’re an island country. In fact, we’ve had probably up to about 120,000 people now come back into New Zealand across the border. We’re dealing with a handful of potential cases from that. I think about Air New Zealand—5,500 flights they’ve operated since May last year, and they’ve dealt with three COVID-19 cases out of that. There are people working exceptionally hard to keep COVID-19 out of New Zealand.

It was a very simple question: can he name one country that could match New Zealand’s suite of advantages—its isolation, its young and spread-out population, its wealth, the prosperity of New Zealand and our civil society? All he had to do was get up and say, “Here’s a bunch of countries.”, but he couldn’t, because there isn’t one. When the Minister says we should all be grateful and lucky, he’s taking the credit for the Government without acknowledging the simple reality that this Government had a less challenging job than any country on earth going into this pandemic. That’s the truth.

Then he enters into the fallacy that to criticise the response of the Government is to attack the hard-working people at the border and at managed isolation and quarantine facilities. Well, actually, that’s interesting, because I’m not aware of anyone in the ACT Party or anyone on this side of the House who has had anything but praise for those hard-working people. Actually, the problem that the Minister has and this Government has is that they are unable to accept any kind of criticism of the approach that they have taken. I would say to the Government that that is a huge vulnerability for New Zealand, because, actually, in order to get better, we have to be prepared to accept criticism and accept the need to get better.

Here’s a simple question for the Minister. It’s astonishing we haven’t heard anything about the NZ COVID Tracer app during the Valentine’s Day outbreak. Could the Minister tell the House: was anybody traced, two people that scanned in at the same location or were traced person-to-person by Bluetooth? How many people were traced using that technology in this outbreak?

In terms of the Bluetooth technology, we don’t have that information, because we don’t collect that information. One of the basic things about the COVID Tracer app is that people collect their own data. They get notifications about whether they may have been exposed, and they respond based on that. We don’t collect all that information. Some of the countries the member likes to laud do collect that information, and they use it for a lot more than just tracing COVID-19 contacts, which is not something that the New Zealand Government has been willing to do.

Which countries, and what else do they use it for?

I haven’t got a list of all of that in front of me. I’m happy to provide the member with that. We do not—

💬 Hon Member: Making it up.

—collect all of that information.

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Who interjected that? Who made that interjection? Nick Smith will leave the House.

Hon Dr Nick Smith withdrew from the Chamber.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There we have it again. The Minister tries to deflect and say other countries are somehow using or misusing citizens’ data because they have better contact tracing. He can’t say if the NZ COVID Tracer app that good, law-abiding New Zealanders are scanning in with each day was actually useful for this outbreak, but he can cast aspersions on other countries that they are doing scurrilous things with their citizens’ data, and we ask him to name a country and he can’t do it. But can I ask the Minister: does the Government have any plans to change the rules or improve the use of the NZ COVID Tracer app after this outbreak, given the answer he just gave—that they don’t know if it was actually useful for tracing anyone in this outbreak?

💬 SPEAKER: The Minister can handle that as part of his reply now.

Of course, I am well known for my skills in—

💬 David Seymour: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I recognise that this is new to the House. My reading of the Standing Orders is that the allocation in Appendix A is five minutes, so I still have 25 seconds on the clock. You’re cutting it short for what reason?

💬 SPEAKER: Yes, I’m not cutting it short at all. What the Standing Orders say is that the Speaker may extend the member’s time to allow for the answers. I have substantially extended the member’s time.

I am well known for my skills in diplomacy, but it is not for me to provide a commentary on what other countries are doing with their COVID tracer apps or name and shame them. The member can read the newspaper himself if he wishes to find out what other countries are doing around that. In terms of encouraging uptake of the COVID Tracer app, yes, that is something that we are looking at. One of the things the member might like to know when it comes to his sudden desire for the Government to be putting in place more compulsory measures, which somewhat highlights the identity crisis of the ACT Party at the moment, is that the Apple/Google exposure notification framework is provided to us to use on the basis that it cannot be made compulsory.

Point of order. I don’t wish to take up the House’s time unnecessarily, but I’m just reflecting on this as this new convention of questions to ministerial statements evolves: if the Minister can take up the time of the member with the call, the incentive to ask questions and yield the floor becomes very weak, and I worry that the whole concept which we’re developing—and which I think you strongly support, Mr Speaker—might collapse. I just ask you to reflect on whether in fact the interpretation shouldn’t be that the member with the floor has five minutes.

💬 SPEAKER: Well, if the member had come to the Standing Orders Committee, he would have heard the discussion, which made it very clear, as the report does, that it is discretionary.

Point of order. I actually do recall that discussion, and I don’t think comments like the one you just made are helpful for the standing of your Chair or for the standing of this House.

💬 SPEAKER: Well, I am almost certain that the member was not there for the final meeting, where that was discussed.

Almost?

💬 SPEAKER: Sorry? You were not always there.

Point of order. How is it helpful for the order of the House for you to engage in this sort of argument? It’s completely superfluous, unnecessary, and I don’t know why you do it.

💬 SPEAKER: Well, I am not going to be responsible for the member’s ignorance.