Look for Drugs and Conditions

 Professor Tony Blakely

Covid 19 elimination is preferred target

 Rohit Shishodia  

A new research conducted by University of Otago, Wellington, New Zealand, has found that the goal of eliminating community transmission of Covid-19 is achievable.

The research has been conducted by the University of Otago, Wellington, Professors of Public Health, Michael Baker and Nick Wilson, together with Professor Tony Blakely, at the University of Melbourne. They are now calling on the World Health Organization to provide more support for countries pursuing elimination as a response to the pandemic, including improved ways of reporting data from countries using this approach.

Professor Baker has pointed out that the goal of elimination is a major departure from pandemic mitigation. “The typical approach of high-income nations such as those in North America and Europe has been a controlled transmission strategy using mitigation or suppression,” he added.

Prof. Baker further said that elimination may now provide the preferred approach to managing emerging pandemics, which is a major revolution in thinking in this area.

He emphasized that experience indicates that elimination of Coivd-19 has been successful in several jurisdictions, albeit with occasional outbreaks from border control failures that need to be managed rapidly and effectively.

“Obvious benefits of rapid elimination are greatly reduced case numbers, a lower risk of health sector overload and fewer overall deaths from Covid-19. There is also an opportunity to avoid serious health inequities, such as the catastrophic effect of previous pandemics on Māori” he added.

Professor Baker stressed that the main cause for writing this paper was to summarise what has been learned in New Zealand and Australia with Covid elimination and to share these lessons with countries struggling with the pandemic.

“Over the course of this year, we have been in regular contact with overseas colleagues, particularly in the UK, who are advocating for their governments to take an elimination or ‘zero covid’ approach. The emergence of an apparently more infectious virus variant is just another reason to eliminate this infection,” said Professor Baker.

The research has found that conditions favouring successful elimination include informed input from scientists, political commitment, sufficient public health infrastructure, public engagement and trust, and a safety net to support vulnerable populations.

Professor Nick Wilson points out that one of the perceived barriers to applying a vigorous response, such as elimination, to the Covid-19 pandemic, is the belief that this might sacrifice the economy and ultimately result in more hardship and negative health effects.

“Our preliminary analysis suggests that the opposite is true. Countries following an elimination strategy – notably China, Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand – have suffered less economically than countries with suppression goals. Our analysis was based on gross domestic product (GDP) projections for all of 2020 from the International Monetary Fund,” said Professor Wilson

The researchers find that international tourism, for example, is substantially reduced, regardless of individual countries having border control restrictions.

Professor Wilson further said that Iceland reopened to tourism, but the demand remained low, imported cases of Covid-19 increased and the net effect was a larger decline in GDP than was seen in New Zealand.

 

 


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