Guest Post: Should we be at Level 0?

A reader writes in:

In recent days we’ve seen no new cases of Covid-19. 

The most recent new case was on the 22nd May and this was linked to a known cluster. 

The Ministry of Health (MoH) states ” The case is linked to the St Margaret’s cluster in Auckland and is a household contact of an earlier case.  Because of their connection to the earlier case, the person has been in isolation since the beginning of Level 4. “

Prior to this case, the next most recent case was on the 17th May and again was linked to a known cluster. 

Since the beginning of May there have been a total of 26 new cases, 3 of these have been from overseas travellers and 21 from known cases or clusters. The remaining two (1st and 2nd May) were of an unknown source (at the time of the media release) and were under investigation. 

New Zealand has had no cases that cannot be linked to known clusters and (from the media briefings) these cases were already isolation.

The typical incubation period of Covid-19 is described as two to fourteen days https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/symptoms-testing/symptoms.html given this it would be reasonable to expect that no transmissions are occurring within the community.

The above, would indicate that we have no community transmission and that any cases are being managed in association with known clusters.

Are our current restrictions now unnecessary? They are causing significant material hardship, large numbers of workers are being made redundant. 

People are increasingly stressed and worried based on the ongoing messagings from the Ministry and the Government for a risk that is negligible, as borne out by the statistics above. 

They key thing is indeed the level of community transmission. This is what triggered the lockdown, but as the reader points out, we’ve been almost a month without a single case of community transmission.