Efeso Collins at his swearing-in ceremony with Mayor Phil Goff in 2016. (Photo by Todd Niall/RNZ).

Covid-19March 1, 2021

‘Post-kindness’ rhetoric targeting South Auckland Covid cases will backfire, warns Efeso Collins

Guest writer

Efeso Collins at his swearing-in ceremony with Mayor Phil Goff in 2016. (Photo by Todd Niall/RNZ).

South Auckland councillor Fa’anana Efeso Collins says talk of a tough crackdown on those who don’t comply with Covid rules will only be counterproductive, particularly when so much has already been asked of his region in response to the pandemic.

Following reports that the latest community Covid-19 case went to the gym directly after his test, there have been suggestions that tougher penalties for those not following the rules should be implemented.

But Manukau ward councillor Fa’anana Efeso Collins said the latest outbreak was also a failure on the part of officials in overestimating how well informed people are about the need to self-isolate.

“We need the messengers to be looked at, rather than just asking public figures to spread the message. We need people on the ground in Papatoetoe for example who can speak Cantonese, Punjabi, Hindi, Samoan and Tongan.”

Collins pointed to low engagement during the census, the region’s gang issues and lower immunisation rates as examples of how disconnected some are in South Auckland. Collins is also chair of the social service Ōtara Health, which is about to employ social workers tasked with helping remedy the suburb’s gang-related violence. He would like to see the Ministry of Health take a similar approach when it comes to the immunisation rollout.

“We’ve started an initiative through Ōtara Health where we’re employing two youth workers who will engage with youth at risk of joining gangs. If the ministry was investing more in social workers and community navigators, you’d get the reach quicker and more efficiently when it comes to a crisis like this, rather than just holding a Zoom meeting for 500 community leaders,” he said.

motorists queueing for Covid-19 tests in the rain in Ōtara — Motorists queue at the Ōtara testing station (Photo: DAVID ROWLAND / AFP)

Given a high number of the MIQ hotels are in South Auckland, along with the bulk of the border workforce, further outbreaks in the region were inevitable.

“We might be a team of five million, but we’re relying on about 400,000 South Aucklanders who are carrying the majority of the load,” said Collins. “And while the rest of the country might be hating on us, Auckland as a whole provides about 40% of GDP, so without us, they’re in trouble.”

Collins is also concerned by the switch in rhetoric from kindness to compliance.

“I can see we’re slowly moving into the post-kindness phase, where instead of being a team of five million, we are hearing that people just need to be compliant, But the danger I see is that if we are forcing people to be compliant, then what does that look like when the vaccine rollout happens and half the community refuse, because it’s being forced on them. So we’ve got to be careful how we communicate things,” he said

“And let’s not forget this is against the backdrop where you have a hospital that was dripping with poo up until recently, and a health system that’s already struggling under the demand for its services, so you can start to see why some will be reticent when asked to comply with further restrictions.”

Collins came under attack last night for backing calls for residents of South Auckland to be prioritised in the vaccine roll-out. “I’ve received a number of messages today with people saying the church should excommunicate me and calling me to repent for supporting a vaccine roll-out in (south) Auckland,” he wrote on Twitter. “These are tough discussions to navigate so open and honest conversations are needed.”

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Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield speak to media at the Beehive. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

PoliticsMarch 1, 2021

When, and how, will we know if the level three lockdown will need to go longer than seven days?

Toby Manhire

Editor-at-large

Jacinda Ardern and Ashley Bloomfield speak to media at the Beehive. (Photo by Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images)

Modelling expert Shaun Hendy tells Toby Manhire which factors will be instrumental in the next big decision.

Auckland begins its second of a scheduled seven days in alert level three today, with the rest of the country in level two, but it won’t be until the middle of the week that the case numbers will be instructive on the chances of stamping out the re-emergence of Covid-19 and moving back to normality, says Shaun Hendy, professor of physics at the University of Auckland and director of Te Pūnaha Matatini.

“Over the next couple of days, if we start to see positive tests come back, particularly positive tests that suggest community exposure as opposed to close contacts, that’s where the alarm bells will start to go off,” he said.

It was encouraging that there was a strong indication yesterday that the new case that triggered the measures had a person-to-person, or “epidemiological link” to another family in the cluster, said Hendy, who has led modelling work that continues to inform government alert level decisions.

“We’ve got the epidemiological link. We’ve got the genomic link,” he said. “But, mid-week, I think we’ll have a sense of the shape of this cluster, and a bit more of an understanding: is a week going to be enough, or will a week look like overkill?”

Wastewater testing will be important, too, in ruling out a widespread outbreak, he said.

The announcement yesterday that “Case M” can be linked to known cases not just by genomic sequencing but also by having been in proximity with one of those cases was a relief, said Hendy.

“If it’s a very short link between the families then that tells us there’s not a big cluster of other cases out there between them,” he said. “The worst case scenario would have been that this family had been exposed early in February somehow. Then we’d be looking at a much bigger outbreak. So the fact they’ve got a plausible same-place-same-time link between those families tells us this is probably just an extension of the cluster we’ve been dealing with for the last couple of weeks.”

The cases in what is now being called the “February cluster” are the “UK variant” of the virus. “The new variants add a couple of twists,” said Hendy. “We’ve got pretty good evidence out of the UK that this B.1.1.7 variant is about 50% more transmissible … There’s been a little bit of evidence, although it’s very preliminary, that people might be infectious for a longer period. At this stage we don’t know. But the potential for growth is much higher, so perhaps chasing down these tails in this cluster, you have to work a bit harder.”

Where an emergence in New Zealand of one of the new variants (the woman who contracted Covid in the Pullman Hotel and travelled in Northland while positive had the South African variant, which is also more transmissible) is most hazardous is in a scenario like the August outbreak, said Hendy. In a case “where we suddenly find, over a couple of days, that we’ve got 50 to 60 cases, we think at that point alert level three wouldn’t be sufficient to contain it, because of that extra 50% transmissibility”, he said. “It might keep a lid on it, but then you might need to stay in alert level three forever. Alert level four, or a ‘level-three-plus’, might be needed to bring a big cluster under control.”

In light of the new cases, was the decision to move swiftly out of the three-day level three lockdown in Auckland, which began a fortnight ago after being announced on Valentine’s Day, too hasty?

“I think in hindsight yes, probably,” said Hendy. “Given what we knew 10 days ago, I think most experts were fairly comfortable with that decision. But I think we underestimated the difficulty with our contact tracers working in the school system.”

He added: “Every time we encounter this virus there’s a new lesson.” In this case, “one of the lessons we should take from this is perhaps the difficulty of working in an educational environment, such as a school or a tertiary education institution. Auckland University would, I’m sure, be a difficult place to handle a cluster like this. Because you’ve got many, many casual encounters taking place, without people being aware of it. It’s different to a normal workplace, where you sit at the same desk, eat lunch at the same place every day. There’s far less routine and repeatability at a school or a campus. So that creates this challenging environment, and there are communications challenges.

“In retrospect, the school environment was probably more challenging than we recognised, especially given the new variants.”