This seems like a strange time to abandon vaccine passes

Thursday, 24 March 2022

Jenny Nicholls is a Waiheke-based writer and columnist.

OPINION: My friends got Covid. The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus came in through the front door like it owned the place – unwanted baggage from a trip to Wellington. Everyone got it – the youngster, the teen, the young man, his partner, both parents.

The hardest thing for my friends was the terrible fear that a loved one would get seriously ill. The second-hardest thing was their fear of infecting others. “Thanks to God, science, and vaccines that it didn’t happen!” my friend texts me now.

She was still isolating when I spoke to her – although her own isolation period was over, her partner tested positive eight days after the family’s first positive test. She is being careful. “It is quite clear from our family’s experience that seven days of isolating are too short.”

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**

The family had a wide constellation of symptoms, most of them mild – they were all double- or triple-vaxxed. One of the few shared symptoms was extreme tiredness, which came on fast. None of them had the severe muscle or joint pain associated with Covid-19 – the youngest had a headache and fever one night, another “a typical flu,” lasting a few days. Several had sore throats. My friend sneezed a couple of times – “which is unlike me” – but had no pain. Covid felt, she said, like a head cold, with ‘brain fog’ – like “weird drumming, from a vast distance”.

After logging the family’s positive cases with the Ministry of Health, she was phoned by her local GP clinic, the Waiheke Medical Centre. “They asked us how we were feeling and managing. They asked us if we had enough food and water. It was really beautiful.”

She was amazed and impressed to get so much support from neighbours and friends. And this came in handy, because she was startled to discover that the only Waiheke supermarket had run out of online order slots.

To help, I grabbed the vast pile of throat lozenges, tissue paper and lemons the family needed, plus one more critical product – “two bottles of cheap shiraz”. The lemons were the hardest to find – they had sold out in a couple of shops. So there’s a sign, I thought. If your local grocer has run out of lemons, or that tree in your neighbourhood suddenly looks plucked, either your neighbour has started pickling lemons, or Covid has arrived for the winter.

“The strangest thing,” my friend said, “was to see my own positive RAT test emerge – two clear red lines on the stick within 90 seconds. Realising that after more than two years of fear of catching Covid-19, I’m in for the ride – I feel connected, in a weird way, to millions of others.”

Another friend’s toddler has just tested positive. As it is impossible not to hug a small child, we know both parents will get sick too.

When Covid arrived at my friend’s house, around one in 25 Waiheke Islanders was known to have been infected. Now it is approximately one in 15 – that’s 610 known community cases out of 9063 permanent residents. Two islanders have died after catching Covid.

So it doesn’t feel as if we are at the crest of the ‘Omicron wave’. Although vaccine passes are clearly temporary, now seems a strange time to abandon them. They made the vulnerable feel safer and signalled good practice. They also helped the country to reach vaccination targets which once seemed impossible. As we are not fully vaxxed without a third dose, those targets have not gone away.

In a blog published just before changes to the vaccine pass were announced, public health experts Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Jennifer Summers, and Prof Michael Baker emphasised the urgent need to improve booster shot numbers. Vaccine passes, upgraded to include third shots, would have really helped here. I know of one holdout who would have booked her third shot in a nanosecond if she needed it to get into the library.

The blog points out that only 73 per cent of the eligible NZ population – (those over 18 years using Ministry of Health data) – have had a third dose. And, with the usual grotesque inequity, just 59 per cent of eligible Māori and 60 per cent of Pasifika (at March 19).

We also need, wrote the trio, to vaccinate more children, as vaccinations appear protective against Long Covid – a suite of symptoms you wouldn’t wish on anyone, let alone a child. Only 8 per cent of the eligible child population have had their second dose.

We have all learned quite a bit about Covid-19 in the last two years, including how to manage our own risk. We also know that you can catch Covid more than once. The flipside? Although there is no shame in catching Covid, it is worth avoiding – for our own health, anxiety levels, and the sanity of health care workers. In fact, of course, we will not all catch Covid. There are masked and vaxxed doctors and nurses who have never tested positive, although they have been exposed every day for months.

Removing vaccine passes will make me more cautious, not less. I asked an immunocompromised friend if he would be visiting any indoor cafés without a vaccine pass system in place.

“Nope,” he said. “Not yet.”

Footnote: CORRECTION: The 10th paragraph of this story has been corrected to read “When Covid arrived at my friend’s house, around one in 25 Waiheke Islanders was known to have been infected”, making clear that proportion included historic cases. (Updated, March 26, 12.30pm)