Does it feel like everyone you know has got COVID-19 at the moment?
One COVID modeller has predicted around three million Kiwis have had the dreaded COVID-19 and unfortunately, a second wave could bring back the coughing, fever and tissues.
While the official figures since the April peak are either declining or plateauing, a second winter wave is likely to hit as immunity wanes.
COVID-19 modeller Dr Dion O'Neale said while we haven't reached the second wave yet, it could be near.
"Not in the middle of a second wave for sure, we'd have much higher case numbers if we were in the middle of it," Dr O'Neale said.
"Possibly though approaching the start of the second wave and possibly at the sort of point where we might start to see numbers moving up a little bit."
Dr O'Neale said case infections are expected to be two to three times higher than the confirmed cases that are being reported, maybe around three million out of five million Kiwis have had the virus.
Dr O'Neale said in a few months, the protection from the infection will wane and more people will be getting re-infected with the virus.
"What we call in modelling is 'the depletion of a susceptible population', so because those people have been previously infected, so for short times there's very low chance of them getting a re-infection. They are probably not going to get infected one or two weeks after they've recently recovered."
"But a few months later, the protection that they had from that infection that's waned quite a lot so they are then able to be re-infected again and certainly that protection from infection is not very good at protecting them from infection via new varients."
He urges people to get vaccinated and wear a mask, particularly indoors and in crowded environments to prevent spreading COVID-19.
