My wife got her flu jab earlier this week and the nurse recommended her to get a COVID booster if she can because cases are spiking again apparently. I think the general public doesn't care as much any more

[–] BalpeenHammer 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I was under the impression that our vaccines have not been updated and are not very useful against the latest variants.

[–] eagleeyedtiger 3 points 6 months ago

I don’t really know. I’m guilty too of not following any of the Covid news haha

[–] Dave 1 points 6 months ago

There is a recently updated vaccine version, available from March.

[–] Dave 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

It's probably not news anymore. No one is reading articles about it, so they don't publish the stories.

In Wellington there's this flu study that also tracks COVID, but they have only just started tracking the 2024 flu season. Still, there's a substantial number of COVID cases. In the past the most recent week has always been inaccurate as they are still waiting for the results of some testing to come through, so ignore that as it's probably not actually a drop (based on the other axis we should see it higher than the first week's results).

[–] BalpeenHammer 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Given the lack of rigorous testing and monitoring I suspect actual reported number of cases should be doubled or tripled. The hospitalisation and deaths are more reliable and that's what we should be monitoring.

[–] Dave 3 points 6 months ago

In terms of MOH reporting, absolutely. Triple is probably still underestimating. You're right about hospitalisations and deaths, data is much better when we don't rely on people self-reporting. Unfortunately I didn't manage to find the right data (though I didn't try particularly hard).

The graph I posted about is from a flu study, the numbers should be very reliable, just affected by the small sample size (from my rough calculations based on the graph, about 1,300 participants). From the graph it looks like about 20/80 confirmed cases, so 20/1300. With a very rough 400,000 people in the Wellington region, that's 6,000 people with COVID in Wellington alone.