Fourteen thousand people could die if Covid-19 spreads out of control in New Zealand – and more if our intensive care units are overwhelmed.
That's according to new modelling being released today by the Government.
A team of Otago University researchers, who provided the modelling to the Ministry of Health, found that a worst case scenario of uncontrolled spread in the country could see up to 64 per cent of the population infected, 32,000 people hospitalised, and up to 14,000 deaths.
"That is a very severe outcome," a researcher who helped carry out the modelling, public health professor Nick Wilson, told RNZ.
But that was based on intensive care units and hospitals being able to function.
Given how hospitals in Spain and Italy had been inundated with patients, Wilson said those figures may have been an "overcautious assumption".
Wilson wanted the ministry to start separating out cases of community transmission from those related to returned overseas travellers, to give a clearer picture of Covid-19 in the community.
He also wanted New Zealand to ramp up its level of testing and contact tracing, saying that testing should be carried out on anyone turning up at an emergency department with respiratory issues, as well as randomly in the community.
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But he said, for now, New Zealand was well placed to stamp out Covid-19 through a strategy of elimination.
"We are in a situation where we really have adopted the best strategy… very few countries have been able to do that."
Wilson was also involved in other modelling that suggested how countries that didn't have that advantage could try to suppress Covid-19 through sustained lockdowns so that peaks in cases didn't arrive until next year, when a vaccine might become available.
Another set of modelling, by researchers from Te Punaha Matatini, showed that - failing eradication - lockdown measures like those in place now could delay a peak for up to 400 days, but wouldn't prevent it.
Any relaxing of those measures could result in hospitals being overwhelmed with a surge six times that of hospital capacity within a few months.
That capacity would be exceeded at the point that 40,000 people contracted the virus.
Left to spread without any controls, the virus could infect 89 per cent of the population and kill up to 80,000.
The best-case scenario if elimination failed – which still involved keeping New Zealand effectively shut down – death numbers would drop to just about 20 people, and hospital capacity would remain within limits for more than a year.
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