Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says New Zealanders will have to accept Covid-19 is “not going to go away” as the virus continues to run rampant through the community.
“I think there’s certainly more infection in the community than the testing numbers will be showing,” he told Q+A on Sunday.
:quality(70):focal(-5x-5:5x5)/cloudfront-ap-southeast-2.images.arcpublishing.com/tvnz/LJLD42ZUNJBMVMZMUXPALSHLZQ.jpg)
“I think there are a lot of people who will be experiencing very mild symptoms. Some of them will be staying home, and some of them will just be completely oblivious to the fact they might have Covid-19.”
It comes after recent models predicted the country’s Covid-19 infection rate could be as much as five times higher than daily case numbers are showing.
Hipkins said it is “certainly possible”, adding, “I suspect there’s a bit of that in the Kiwi psyche sometimes – ‘we’ll just see if it gets worse before we get a test’ and that could well be resulting in this not picking up a lot of cases”.
The minister, however, deflected criticism that an earlier roll out of rapid antigen tests could have picked up the cases being missed.
Thirteen million rapid antigen tests were bought by the Government in November and December, which Hipkins said was “as many as were available at the time”.
“Potentially, we would have bought more rapid antigen tests earlier if we’d been able to get hold of them but of course, you’ve got to keep it in mind when we were using PCR tests as our mainstay of our testing, there was a really good rationale for that. We couldn’t afford to have cases slipping through the cracks.”
Hipkins said while the Omicron peak is expected to subside in the coming weeks, we “do have to accept that we are going to be moving to a state where Covid-19 is going to be out there and it’s not going to go away”.
“We’re not going to get back to an elimination phase with Covid-19 – those days are past us now so what we do from here is going to look different to what we’ve done in the past.”
However, he said while the threat of future pandemics loom large, there is also room for optimism.
“I do feel like New Zealanders can start looking forward to getting back to something that feels a lot more normal than what we’ve had over the last two years.”
