A leading surgeon says New Zealand's vaccine mandates have been the key to keeping COVID-19 deaths low and our hospitals running smoothly.
It comes after anti-mandate protesters camped out at Parliament for 23 days. While the protesters were eventually removed many have re-grouped around the country. They are calling for the immediate removal of all vaccine mandates.
Vaccination is mandatory for workers across several sectors including border, health, education, police, Defence Force, Corrections, Fire and Emergency, and close contact businesses that operate using vaccine certificates under the traffic light system.
While Omicron is milder than previous variants, it is far more transmissible, meaning because of the sheer number of people getting infected, hospitalisations are far higher now that at any other point in the pandemic.
Those who are unvaccinated are far more likely to end up in hospital, with daily Ministry of Health data showing they are overrepresented in hospitalisation statistics for the small proportion of the population they make up.
General surgeon and Medicus Chairman Dr Richard Stubbs says the protest shows many Kiwis don't understand the true importance of mandates.
"The mandates have been absolutely key to our low mortality rate and keeping hospitals running so far," Dr Stubbs says. "Use of hospital and other health resources has been manageable up to now with the numbers of cases, but this could easily change, and probably will."
He says when hospitals are full of COVID-19 patients other patients suffer. On Thursday, 300 of Auckland's 2500 hospital beds were taken by COVID patients. Stubbs says that will put pressure on elective services.
"Every hospital bed taken for a COVID case encroaches on those beds and those staff. We are already expecting to see large portions of our hospitals filled with COVID patients, even with our vaccine mandates and relatively high vaccination rates.
"That means people with 'non-urgent' procedures will have to wait. Many of those people will be suffering - their procedures absolutely will not feel 'non-urgent' to them."
Stubbs says if hospitals are overrun by COVID-19 patients an entire generation could face living with debilitating illness or dying early.
"Think reduced and cancelled heart operations, hip surgery, gallbladder surgery, access to tests like CT scans, even cancer treatment, the list goes on.
"Everything from life-threatening illnesses to disabling conditions must simply be lived with for longer, which means a vast amount of people and an entire generation will live debilitated or, in many cases, die early due to diseases not being caught early and treated."
The mandates also help protect healthcare staff enabling them to continue treating patients, Stubbs points out.
He says New Zealanders are blissfully unaware of the impacts our mandates and subsequent high vaccination rates have had.
"In the United Kingdom, we're seeing that over 10 percent of the population is on a waiting list for some kind of procedure.
"I don't think New Zealanders quite appreciate the magnitude of the gains we've made here. New Zealand's ability to maintain a 'normal' healthcare service through the last two years of this pandemic is what government mandates have delivered, whereas most healthcare systems around the world will never be able to catch up."
He also urged everyone not to become complacent as Omicron cases rise, saying the pandemic isn't over yet.
"Omicron is going to be a real problem for the next six weeks or so. Maybe after then, we can think about relaxing. But we cannot let the brake off now."
There were 22,527 new cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand on Friday and 562 people in hospital.
