As Covid cases in Auckland and Waikato grow, the spotlight is on how exactly the DHB would respond to a localised outbreak. Photo / NZME
Whanganui's medical officer of health is warning the likelihood of Covid-19 spreading to the region is high, as Auckland's Delta outbreak continues to grow.
Dr Patrick O'Connor is the statutory officer for the Whanganui region, appointed by director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield to oversee the public health response within the region.
O'Connor told the Whanganui Chronicle it was highly likely the region would see a case of Covid-19 soon.
"It's very high. As we move to this so-called 'living with Covid on our terms' phase, then it's not going to just divert around us."
"I can't say when, but it's a very likely scenario."
O'Connor said that while the Government appeared to have ditched the elimination strategy in Auckland, outside of our largest city it was likely that elimination would still be the plan of attack.
"Things appear to have moved on in Auckland, but you can bet your bottom dollar that if cases pop up elsewhere, they'll be doing everything they can to stop the spread."
As for timeframes, O'Connor said he had no modelling which suggested when a case could arrive.
"We wait for the 1pm and 4pm conferences like everyone else."
Otago University professor in public health Dr Nick Wilson last week warned it was likely there would be further cases across the North Island, with the Government's current approach to the Auckland and Waikato borders.
"If [the Government doesn't] do a proper job on the border then we may as well give up on the North Island - it would just be unrealistic otherwise.
"We've had multiple cases over the border - the truck driver down to Palmerston North, the person in the Hauraki area and the prison officer infected in Auckland... the whole country's paying the price for this loose border."
The Whanganui region has seen just nine cases of Covid-19 since the beginning of the pandemic - all during the first outbreak in New Zealand during March and April last year.
Most of those cases were left to isolate in their own homes, and it's not believed there was any direct community spread within Whanganui itself.
Whanganui DHB's Covid-19 vaccination rollout manager Louise Allsopp said the organisation had a plan should the virus arrive in our community.
Part of that plan involved the DHB managing the isolation of a community case of Covid-19 when it turned up.
Up until last week, all positive Covid-19 cases were placed into a designated quarantine facility - either the Jet Park Hotel near Auckland Airport or a new facility established this month at a hotel in Hamilton.
Those facilities have since reached capacity, with new cases now being instructed to isolate at home.
In July, Dr O'Connor signalled the DHB would likely isolate positive cases at a makeshift location somewhere in the city, similar to the process undertaken by MidCentral DHB when a case was discovered in Palmerston North a fortnight ago.
"If people who are visiting the Whanganui region are a Covid-19 case or a close contact of a case, it may be that we would need to arrange some accommodation for them locally and that would fall under the community MIQ co-ordinator role," he said.
According to a DHB spokesperson, decisions around isolation would be left in the hands of O'Connor as the medical officer of health.
But in the situation some of these hypothetical cases required treatment, the DHB had also put together a plan for how to manage infection within Whanganui Hospital.
The DHB's director of nursing Lucy Adams said Whanganui Hospital had six intensive care beds - three of which were ventilated.
Adams did not say what the DHB's worst-case scenario would look like, but that modelling was dependent on the Government's strategy to fight the virus alongside vaccination rates.
"WDHB has Covid response plans," Adams said. "Vaccination numbers change scenario modelling; good hand hygiene and mask-wearing also reduces the likelihood of transmission."
The executive director of the Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, Sarah Dalton, said if the outbreak continued to grow as modelling predicts, regional hospitals were going to be hardest hit.
"We have been repeatedly told by our ICU specialists that there has been no meaningful investment or expansion in ICU capacity and in many parts of the country staffing levels are running at unsafe levels," she said.
"A number of our regional hospitals won't be able to keep patients because their ICUs are so poorly equipped, meaning staff and patients will have to be juggled across different parts of the country".
Dalton said the lack of ICU capacity will have significant flow-on effects for the rest of the health system.
"Planned care is already being delayed due to overwhelming acute demand, even in regions which haven't seen Covid cases yet".
Those comments were put to the DHB, but it did not respond.