A public health expert is confident it is safe for the South Island to drop down Covid-19 alert levels.
Experts are calling for wastewater testing to be given more focus as regions face a possible drop in alert levels. Photo: ESR
Cabinet meets later today to decide on whether to extend the national lockdown beyond midnight, or allow regions excluding Auckland to drop down alert levels and enjoy an easing of restrictions this weekend.
Professor Nick Wilson, from University of Otago's Department of Public Health, told Morning Report he believed with robust safety measures in place, a drop in alert levels was appropriate for the South Island.
Traces of Covid-19 have been found in Christchurch's wastewater, which has made some nervous. However, there are three active cases in managed isolation in the city and professor Wilson agrees this probably accounts for the detection. Further test results would help give clarity on whether this was the case, he added.
"I would like to see a really stronger level 3 with mask-wearing, for example, indoors as an extra level of protection" - Public health expert professor Nick Wilson
"Given our past experience with MIQ facilities producing positive results, this is not at all surprising, the situation in Christchurch, and they have been testing yesterday upstream of the facility and downstream, so we should get clarity on that quite soon," Wilson said.
"But I think, given the large number of sites around the South Island that have been testing negative through the last week, I would have quite a high level of confidence that the South Island should move to alert level 3. But I would like to see a really stronger level 3 with mask-wearing, for example, indoors as an extra level of protection."
Wilson joins other public health experts who argue wastewater testing is critical to the Delta outbreak response and that it should be scaled up to cover new sites nationally, providing daily testing in more areas.
"In this analysis that we just put out yesterday it seems that wastewater testing is generally far more effective and much less costly than community testing, especially in declaring a region to be Covid-free," he said.
Professor Nick Wilson. Photo: Supplied / Luke Pilkinton-Ching
"So we'd really like to see wastewater testing expanded even further and many of the sites are just on weekly, or two-weekly testing and I'd like to see that moved up to daily and that would give us an even better picture.
"Given how much more effective wastewater is than community testing we really think it should have been given a higher priority."
Wilson said the department of Health should keep better track of Covid-19 positive people leaving MIQ and noting where they are living, so that any positive wastewater results can be accessed more clearly in those locations.
There are also ways to determine whether positive wastewater results show people in the area recovering from the virus or signal active cases.
"There are actually some ways on some occasions to actually address that by measuring the amount of volume of viral fragments and actually we should be keeping a better track of prior cases when they leave MIQ to help sort out these types of issues," he said.