Omicron could force more changes to the country’s contact tracing system, with the Department of Health carefully monitoring the situation in Australia and the UK.
Director of Public Health Dr. Caroline McElnay.
Photo: Billiards / Tips / Robert Kitchin
Contact tracing is key to containing any incursion of the new variant of Covid-19, but the system struggled to keep up at the height of the Delta outbreak.
Tracing will be key to containing any outbreak over the Christmas period as New Zealanders move across the country.
Director of Public Health Dr Caroline McElnay said Omicron was a game-changer.
“It spreads quickly…cases get infected very quickly after exposure,” she said.
This has made rapid contact tracing all the more vital, to isolate them before they can expose someone else.
The department was looking closely at New South Wales where Omicron cases were skyrocketing, McElnay said.
“If we had Omicron in the community and if we had, in particular, superspreader events, we could start to see a fairly rapid increase in cases, and I think it could be difficult for contact tracing alone to be able to bring those numbers. down.”
McElnay said Omicron, like Delta, mainly spreads in homes or places where people spend a lot of time in close contact, so that’s where it would focus if a large outbreak suddenly develops.
Any changes to the system could include a greater focus on tracing the highest-risk cases, with less emphasis on those with very little contact or who have not been in risky environments, he said. she declared.
“Individual cases with very few contacts who have not been to high-risk locations, we may not spend a lot of time identifying all of those contacts. We can, as we did in Auckland, stop registering all these places of interest because we know that we are unlikely to receive cases from those.”
Epidemiologist Michael Baker said that was the right approach.
Contact tracing was a vital part of the country’s efforts to try to prevent the healthcare system from being overrun by Covid.
“If we had a very rapid outbreak of Omicron in New Zealand, we would need all the tools we could operate at maximum efficiency,” he said.
The Covid Tracer app used to scan a QR code.
Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas
It’s been a huge year for contact tracers, especially those in Auckland.
South Seas Healthcare chief executive Lemalu Silao Vaisola-Sefo leads a large team including doctors, nurses, testers, vaccinators and contact tracers.
They had been strongly motivated by helping their community and buoyed by the high vaccination rates, he said, but now everyone needed a break.
“Energy levels are slowly decreasing over time. The last four weeks have been a really big push for the staff.”
The Auckland Public Health Unit is working to give tired tracers time off, while ensuring they are able to step in if needed.
It will have fewer staff working over Christmas and New Year, but many will be on standby if they are to return.
McElnay said if there was an outbreak in a small district health board area, like Tairawhiti, the national system would kick in.
There had been big changes since the start of the Delta outbreak, including a nationwide phone service and an email questionnaire to reach more contacts.
The system could scale over a two-week period to be able to trace 1,000 cases a day, handling 11,000 initial contacts, she said.
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