New Zealand’s Covid-19 lockdowns almost halved the country’s usual number of hospitalisations for acute respiratory infections.
National data shows there were 51,953 publicly funded hospital discharges in the 2018-19 financial year for such infections.
The country’s first confirmed case of Covid was announced in late February 2020, leading to periods of border and lockdown restrictions, whether nationwide or region-specific.
Data released under the Official Information Act shows there were just 26,841 discharges for acute respiratory infections
That number then increased to 36,352 in 2021 and 47,743 in 2022.
The data covers discharges assigned the code J00-J22, which includes conditions such as influenza, pneumonia, the common cold, bronchitis and tonsillitis.
A Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand spokesperson says that before 2023, Covid-19 or Covid-related hospitalisations were given a variety of primary diagnosis codes that didn’t necessarily fall under these codes.
The spokesperson says the dramatic drop in respiratory infections could be attributed to the the lockdown periods when people were not moving around and interacting with others or travelling abroad, which had limited the spread of respiratory illnesses.
Discharge numbers have since begun returning to normal levels.
The data for 2023 is expected to become available in the next three to six months, and it's anticipated that hospital discharges for respiratory infections would return to pre-Covid levels.
As of Monday, 2,574,813 cases of Covid-19 have been officially reported since the virus first entered the country in 2020.
But as epidemiologist Michael Baker pointed out a few weeks ago, Kiwis aren’t reporting infections as readily now that the self-isolation requirements have stopped — which means it's impossible to know the true number of infections.
At midnight on Sunday, there were 258 people in hospital with Covid-19, with a rolling average of 43 admissions a day.
In the past week, an average of three Kiwis died of Covid-19 each day.
A total of 3768 deaths have been attributed to the virus since the start of the pandemic.
2 comments
Ha, old Mike
Posted on 02-02-2024 08:55 | By an_alias
Lockdowns worked, ah, how right you are, yes I can see inflation is still high and many business are gone.....yep that worked......
Did we still All catch the virus.....ah, so we did........so you tell me it worked aye........
Many people lost there jobs and you tell me it worked.....
Yeah the man who has been given the job of "pep" talker or well, I have a different name for it and it sounds like shut.
spot on
Posted on 02-02-2024 20:41 | By This Guy
an_alias is right, what's a few thousand dead folks when it hurts business so much. MONEY is what's important in this world, not some silly thing like ~*public health*~ America let a million people die and they're doing just fine now (and fewer people live here, so the death toll would have been lower.) Corporations NEVER would have put the price of everything up anyway, no sir! They're good, honest entities, and it's important that they get their obscene profits above all else!
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