New Zealand’s goal to eliminate Covid-19 reached a milestone on Wednesday with no one needing hospital-level care as a result of the disease caused by the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus.
It follows the discharge of a patient from Middlemore Hospital, with Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield telling a media briefing he thought it was the first time in a couple of months that no one had been in hospital with the disease.
While there was “never a big number” of patients hospitalised with Covid-19 in New Zealand, getting to the point where no one was in hospital with the illness was “another good position to be in”, he said.
Despite that, it’s not time to celebrate yet, with Professor Michael Baker, from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, saying he was looking for “a long line of zeros” along with confidence there was no transmission of the disease.
