Covid 19 Omicron: NZ surpasses US death rate for the first time
New Zealand has marked its darkest day of the pandemic with a record 34 deaths, taking the country’s Covid-19 mortality rate past that of the United States for the first time.
Experts say despite daily case numbers starting to plateau, given the lag in hospitalisations and deaths, that rate could climb even higher over the next few weeks.
And with case numbers in our biggest city also dropping, a top health official has warned of a “Mexican wave” of infections and regional spikes, as Canterbury and South Canterbury experience a peak.
University of Otago epidemiologist professor Michael Baker said New Zealand’s daily Covid-related deaths per million over a seven-day rolling average were now higher than in the US, which is about a month out from its Omicron peak.
Covid has exposed the bleeding gums of our inequality in a way bandaids and half measure social policy simply won’t cauterise.
It will seep into the rotten cavities of the societal inequality we have persistently ignored.
Overcrowded cold homes where the middle class work from home privilege doesn’t extend to.
The over stretched food banks, the culture of dumping our old people into lowest cost accomodation and the motel half measures for the homeless all combine with 50 000 households living in poverty, hundreds of thousands of kids in poverty and entire generations now locked out of home ownership.
The user pays neoliberal experiment of the last 30 years has made the speculators and bankers rich beyond imagination while the poor have fought over the crumbs.
The vast majority of Kiwi’s who have died so far are over 70, once it gets into our under resourced retirement industrial complex, deaths will soar over 400.
Turns out fighting Covid means beating poverty.
How did we forget that?
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But 34 people did not die of covid, in fact no one, especially the Ministry of Health will say.
But they did at least note that some simply had covid on top of all their other illnesses but did not die from it. And in reality perhaps none of that 34 did! And by their flawed math, how many are in hospital specifically because of covid and not for another medical problem? Who really knows?
When numbers quoted become fiction, no one listens to them anymore! The question becomes why!
And yet that headlines every media update. Why?
I appreciate that MSM is a business and that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ and most probably encouraged by a govt that wants Covid in the headlines to keep everything else buried. But there must come a time when a Covid case is the buried on page 6.
Around 2/3rd of the deaths of those with COVID would not have occurred if they were not infected.
Can you prove that or is that willful thinking on your part?
because already the claim that they died in 1 day is false.
From RNZ
“Director of Public Health Caroline McElnay says the deaths reported today have occurred over the past 10 days.”
So please provide a proof for your statement.
Just as well we have a super safe and super effective vaccine that 95% of people have taken and 75% of those have boosted that totally stops you getting infected. Oh wait.
But many NZers don’t want to get their kids vaccinated (cause apparently Omicron is mild) and it might be for many kids but are they happy for them to pass it on to people who at risks and we are seeing it now.
They do have separate stats for those who died with Covid but not necessarily as the main cause, and for those who died with Covid as the underlying cause.
https://www.health.govt.nz/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-data-and-statistics/covid-19-case-demographics#deaths
I think it’s hard to tell with those who died where the main cause was something else, if Covid contributed to the death because it weakened their immune system. Sometimes they do a postmortem to check, but I’m not sure if they always do.
They don’t have stats by economic class, but the fact that Maori are 50% of the deaths compared with European or other are due to Covid as the underlying cause is an indication that the poorest are hardest hit.
My understanding is it is difficult to determine cause of death when a person with comorbidities gets Covid this was what our Aussie epidemiologist have said. If we are underestimating imagine what some other countries have done or are currently doing. As for the fear element one only had to watch tv and see mass graves, burning of the Covid dead in Indian and so on. Give us some credit we are not that fucken stupid when we see what’s happening overseas we are thankful we are far away and have a half decent health system. But never the less Covid is here due to travel and we need to deal with it.
I agree with your thoughts. It seems the anti vax brigade need to prove they have superior intelligence to the majority that are vaxinated and we are being led by the nose . In truth they just look silly and not worth spending time arguing with .I am just pleased the mandates sorted out the teachers medical people who should not be trusted due to being easily swayed by social media
but all they demonstrate is their sheep like stupidity readily believing and buying right into the next twist in the party line like good little maoists…
when’s trumpy due in the white house like caesar crossing the rubicon? how many deadlines have passed? being a prime example this evasion
According to an article in the Herald last night, fewer than 50 of the 338 mortalities blamed on covid can be attributed to being caused by covid.
Simply because someone starts to question Mickey Mouse statistics given to us by a bumbling arrogant bureaucracy like the MOH does not make them antivax, which I’m not.
In fact it undermines what’s left of the credibility of the MOH and why the country is currently being strangled by the traffic light restrictions!
There is no we in No Zealand. No Zealand is less of a country than the Solomon Islands.
The Solomons Prime Minister like many others has been brought wait till the Chinese start killing their people who object to there presents, my concern is for the other Pacific nations and their people.
so you’d prefer indonesia to be the ‘protecting power?’ or red faced okker racists?
Lol. Slowly but surely the sheeple are learning our Glorious Leader didn’t save anyone and just delayed the inevitable. Along the way poor man’s Gordon Brown pissed 100B against the wall of corporate welfare and woke pet projects while Allowing the criminal element of this country a free pass in the name of progressive thinking.
Happy times indeed
Having got the Bug (Covid 19) at present myself this will definitely hit people with underlying health conditions hard. I have had a dry cough for 4 weeks now, which is a symptom of Long Covid. Note I have been a casual smoker over the past 50 years, health average, mixed caucasian middle class, healthy diet.
We sort of needed the Pfizer anti-viral here last month.
And when it arrives in April we need to use it well – identifying the infections of those at risk asap and getting the treatment to them early.
Yep, we definitely need more of the awesome totally not corrupt Big Pharma to solve the pandemic with more untested drugs.
and those drugs were developed by a dreadlocked hippy chick in her herb garden I suppose?
34 people died over a period of 10 days, and then they might have died of car accidents, heart attacks and old age but WITH Covid.
This fearmongering shit is getting so old and so tired.
We will have a fairly high death rate because of the appalling health standard of so many of our citizens.
It stands to reason that the poorer the diet and the fitness, the lower the immunity. These are factors our governments over the years have deliberately refused to ameliorate.
Agree but also to an extent, genetics and behaviour play a part. Behaviour as in, anti or no vax. I note PI deaths are lower than Maori particularly amongst younger folk. (PI have high vax rates across the board and equal or higher health risk than Maori)
When parents refuse to vaccinate their kids (and its there right) there is nothing we can do but let them spread it and unfortunately someone else usually bears the brunt this is the hard reality.
Yep the immediate death statistics don’t make for pleasant reading, but somehow me thinks this is only the beginning as we move on from covid and the imposed mandates the true mortality rates alongside other collateral damage imposed on society will truly manifest itself in the coming years.
Interesting read in the NZ herald over the weekend on the toll it has taken on the people, mainly the NZ defence force personnel who have managed the various MIQ facilities around NZ/AO.
omnicron is RELATIVLY mild what if the next wave is a higher mortality varient…and we simply DO NOT KNOW the answer to that, let’s hope there isn’t a next varient but we can’t bank on that.
before anyone lies that viruses always get weaker that’s patently untrue that’s the tendency but not guaranteed, spanish flu evolved from something.
Relatively mild, tell that to the many families whose loved ones have died.
you will note the use of the ‘modifier’ relatively
My understanding is it is difficult to determine cause of death when a person with comorbidities gets Covid this was what our Aussie epidemiologist have said. If we are underestimating imagine what some other countries have done or are currently doing. As for the fear element one only had to watch tv and see mass graves, burning of the Covid dead in Indian and so on. Give us some credit we are not that fucken stupid when we see what’s happening overseas we are thankful we are far away and have a half decent health system. But never the less Covid is here due to travel and we need to deal with it.
if the ‘economy’ isn’t working for most NZers and it clearly isn’t why do we listen to constant propaganda from business disguised as ‘expert opinion’….something that’s bad for THEIR economy might well be good for the people….
despite what economists assert economics isn’t a science it’s and ideology as relevant or irrelevant as any other ideology the test is in who does it ‘work for’ it’s clear our economy advantages 1 group over the many, if people are fine with that then the ideology is relevant but it’s not science that’s a lie to provide a fig leaf for selfish decisions.
AO/NZ had an opportunity to be free of covid 19. Admittedly radical action would have been called for. Like no tourists, no desperate AO/NZ’ers coming home unless they could prove they didn’t have covid BEFORE they got on that plane, boat or private charter. And everyone here popped onto an easily affordable living wage after we ran the filthy and now murderous little foreign owned banksters into the Tasman Sea.
34 people are dead because the institutionalised greed of a few forced its way between us and commonsense.
LOOK AROUND !? WHAT DO YOU SEE? SOMALIA? SYRIA? SOME DESPERATE AFRICAN STATE WHERE PEOPLE EAT GRASS TO STAVE OFF HUNGER PAIN?
No.
We live in a paradise. We live on a country the size of the UK but we only have 5.1 million people to share it with. Our primary industry is agriculture. For those of you who only know the restaurants along Ponsonby Road as your source of foods, agricultural is the profession of food production. That’s right Brad and Amy with your little Thomas and Clamydia just about to start school. We make food. Fucking tons of it.
Tourism? Wank. Auckland and Wellington Tech industry? Wank. Wank, wank, wank.
You want to show a tourist around when the bones of your arse are sticking through your jeans? How about an edible iPhone made from sustainable vegetable bi-products? I.e. compost?
Our gubbimint could have easily paid a living wage to everyone while this awful disease went past us but that would have set off alarm bells because, how come suddenly all that money? What do you reckon graham hart with your 11 billion dollars and your 55 million dollar apartment overlooking NYC’s central park? Government printing office was it? Fay? Richwhite? Gibb? Chandler? Todd Group? etc? All that money you have in your pocketsessss? That’s AO/NZ farmer money. It’s not fucking yours. Give it back!
The unelected Old Boy riche forced OUR government to open the borders so’s they could ka ching it all the way to the bankster and most of those dirty kiwi fuckers live in Australia and at other off-shore addresses anyway.
I reckon our government should be charged with the wilful murder of 34 people. Think of it as contract killings ordered up by the Boys?
Aye Boys?
Fear hasn’t come from our government, people need to stop blaming we only had to watch TV and see mass graves in South America, cremating in India and bodies stacked in makeshift morgues (namely vehicles) in America that is enough to make anyone fearful. Covid has had and continues to have a toll on the entire world not just little NZ. Lets hope the new anti viral drug is distributed more equitably as the vaccine rollout wasn’t. We should have vaccinated our youngest first as they were and remain more reluctant instead we vaccinated our elderly who are more likely to get vaccinated without too much coercion.
You mean “we’re all in this together”, was nothing more than propaganda!!?!
We have a sick broken system, which makes it impossible for democracy to flourish.
Sars-Covid19 is showing up all the faults and all the fickleness of late stage capitalism.
The Greedy just can’t be stopped from their unquenched desires – to the detriment of us all.
We have a broken country with some broken people with warped views and ideology.
Like this guy…
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/parliament-protest-donations-went-into-bank-account-of-man-with-history-of-unpaid-debt/R42YDV3EMXIGHEF2CR25L6XZM4/
@ Ignatius…
Fundamentally; yes.
There’s no ‘free’ MSM in AO/NZ. There’s no investigative free to air TV unless you regard Aunty John Campbell as being investigative. He probably could be if he put down his knitting. The Daily Blog is the only media I regard as being challenging to the status quo and you can’t deny there’s a riche status quo hell bent in maintaining that rich status quo. Otherwise, we’d be significantly better off and we’d not have off-shore kiwi billionaires plugged into our money veins. More over, we’d still have our world class infrastructure and amenities and poverty, homelessness and hungry kids would be a thing of nightmares in someone else’s country. Not ours!
It’s also my opinion that the latest occupy parliament’s lawns bumble fuck that was likely good intentions but was lousy with shills derailing and diffusing the RIGHT to protest. I used to refer to rats in our midst as ‘confederates’ but ‘shill’ is faster to spell.
You seen this guy on RNZ’s work of fiction? Was he stupid, desperate, ignorant or was he a plant, however unwitting, to drip toxins of distrust and confusion into the entire process?
There are more novelties than Covid 19 at work in AO/NZ at this point. In my opinion.
Of course, I could be wrong. About everything. I could be wrong about agriculture being our primary industry. I could be wrong about how the super rich have plugged into that particular income vein thanks to their all bought and lobbied politicians. Of course I could be wrong about how there’s nothing new in that EXCEPT, that modern times with the ability to share information instantly was never seen coming nor was a virus exposing the super rich to unwelcome scrutiny by people like myself. But I could be wrong. Am I wrong? If you think I’m wrong, the what’s your counter argument? A snide sentence isn’t going to cut the mustard mate’s.
RNZ
“Protest donations went into bank account of man with history of unpaid debt”
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/464328/protest-donations-went-into-bank-account-of-man-with-history-of-unpaid-debt
You need to either wake up, or fuck off, because you’re either stupid or you’re one of Them.
And that goes for you too covid is pa.
yer not wrong iggy
Man who threatens to kill our PM gets one year in prison, man who deals meth gets 15 years in prison and man who has sexually abused young men gets 6 months home detention, something is seriously wrong here.
yup sentencing here especially if you have ‘influential’ friends is a fuckin joke..
‘the best justice money can buy’
Austin Petersen and Eric Draitser are just fabulous in this 2013 debate. I usually re-watch it every couple of years to see whose arguments I’m now leaning towards. Lots of entertaining clapbacks too.
https://www.rt.com/shows/crosstalk/mcdonalds-us-american-dream-725/
McDonaldization:
Has the American dream come to an end? What does the recent McDonald’s minimum wage guide say about the nature of labor in the US? And, is there a way to improve income disparity? CrossTalking with Austin Petersen and Eric Draitser.
They quickly forgot all the working people on temporary covid unemployment benefits earning twice the normal benefit, I remember last year Labour saying partners could earn up to $3k a week!
Yet people like me with partners who work dont even qualify for a standard benefit. For me that would have been supported living payment.
Govt is bending over backwards to help the well off while not doing anything about poverty, did a bunch of reviews and sat on them but did a whole lot of things that benefited investors and other rich people
yup it looks like the state will be underwriting uninsurable homeowners in the event of adverse weather events….HUZZAH for the blairite
I thought this article summed it up succinctly: https://www.rt.com/news/552626-ukraine-conflict-living-standard/
because: https://www.rt.com/business/553002-us-russia-oil-imports/
hypocrisy at it’s finest if rt is correct
When parents refuse to vaccinate their kids (and its there right) there is nothing we can do but let them spread it and unfortunately someone else usually bears the brunt, this is the hard reality.