This international study conducted by authors from China and the United States provides further evidence that the Aotearoa New Zealand Covid-19 response has been highly effective at minimised deaths during the pandemic.  Unlike many previous studies, it focusses on the period when Covid-19 began circulating widely in this country – what these author call ‘Living with Covid’ (LWC) – which occurred here from February 2022 onwards.  It also uses percentage excess mortality (PEM) as its main outcome measure, which allows robust comparisons across countries that have quite different disease surveillance systems.

The analysis covered five jurisdictions – four of which used elimination strategies (New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, and Hong Kong SAR) and one which suppressed transmission to low levels (South Korea).  As is well known, these strategies were very effective at minimising Covid-19 deaths and resulted in low or even negative excess mortality during the first one to two years of the pandemic.

What this study adds is a comparative analysis of excess mortality after these jurisdictions transitioned to LWC which occurred when the Omicron variant resulted in widespread transmission.  It showed that New Zealand was the only jurisdiction to sustain low excess mortality during this period of high infection (defined as a PEM of under 10%).  The other countries had PEM ranging up to 71.14% in the case of Hong Kong for the first half of 2022, and 39.85% in Australia during that period.

These findings fit with other ongoing analyses showing that New Zealand is one of the only countries to have sustained net negative excess mortality for the duration of the pandemic (i.e. from January 2020 until March 2023).

The results of this study support New Zealand’s strong focus on reducing the health impact of Covid-19.  These measures include promoting vaccination, mandatory self-isolation of cases, mask mandates in health care and aged care settings, and free access to antivirals for vulnerable groups.  It is important that we don’t become complacent to the ongoing impact of Covid-19.  Despite a decline in case numbers, this virus is still on track to put more than 10,000 New Zealanders in hospital and cause more than 500 deaths this year, based on present rates.