There were 143 Covid-19 cases announced in the community but there was some good news for Christchurch and vaccination numbers across Aotearoa. Video / NZ Herald
A London professor says he's moderately worried about the latest strain of Covid-19, but believes the vaccine will still be able to cope.
Imperial College London Professor of Immunology Danny Altman told Mike Hosking on Newstalk ZB that the AY4.2 Delta plus strain will likely be across the whole UnitedKingdom in three months' time.
When asked by Hosking how worried he was, Altman said "I'm moderately worried".
"It's another increment ... Delta was a big increment and this is another small but increasing increment after Delta.
As for whether it was always going to happen, Altman said he had hoped Delta was the peak variant but on reflection none had "seemed very threatening".
"If you had asked me two or three months ago, I was hopeful perhaps that Delta was the virus achieving peak variant.
"In terms of having all mutations and if it could evade immunity and become more transmissible. But if I think about it, none of the sequences we had seen in the meantime had taken over from it or seemed very threatening ... and now something does come along that's somewhat more transmissable and more invasive.
"It didn't need to happen had we had more mitigations in place."
It could now take just three months before the whole United Kingdom was swamped with Delta plus given it was more transmissible than the original strain.
"If you look at the UK stats, it's creeping up, it was 5, 10 and in parts of the southeast it's now 20 per cent so I think we probably have to assume, that if we have this conversation again in three months' time the whole of the UK will be AY4.2 Delta plus."
However, he expected the current vaccinations to cope with controlling the spread.
"I suspect so, pretty much because it doesn't look like a mutation that's good at evading immunity... so in the same way as Delta is just about coping, and keeping things at bay, the vaccination will cope with this as well."
Meanwhile, Auckland University professor Des Gorman told Hosking the Government had lost control of the current Delta outbreak.
He said the Government now seemed to be focused on protecting the health system. "There's two figures. How many people are in hospital or ICU.
"The whole system is geared toward protecting the health system. Everything else, with all due respect, is almost superfluous."
With hospital admissions increasing by 9 per cent, Gorman said that was not a lot.
"No, it's not, particularly when there's only two in ICU. Leapt by 9 per cent is what you say when you don't understand science. That sort of relative comment hides the fact that the absolute number increases diddly squat."
Gorman said he was comfortable with just a couple of people in ICU.
"I'm comfortable I think, yes, we've seen more cases but they're not translating to seriously ill people ending up in ICU and I think that's because a lot of people getting the infection are quite young."
New Zealand's higher rate of vaccination was helping preventing the spread of Covid, he said.
