From today’s Ministry of health update (Doctor Ashley Bloomfield):
85 new cases, 76 confirmed and 9 probable – that makes the combined total 368.
That’s up a little from yesterday’s rise of 78.
6 in hospital stable, 2 ‘less stable’, one in Wellington Hospital but not on a ventilator, the other is in intensive care in Nelson (that person already had significant underlying health conditions, was doing OK, but their condition deteriorated).
37 recovered – those who have recovered from Covid-19 are signed off by a health official after being symptom free for a 14 day period.
The epidemic notice unlocks special powers for medical officers. Dr Bloomfield has issued a notice prohibiting large gatherings.
The Ministry is seeking retired and non-practicing health professionals in case they are needed.
They still expect to daily total to grow, and says it will take 7-10 days from today top turn that around, if the lockdown is effective.
Testing capacity is now over 2,000 a day, but individual tests are decided based on the judgement of clinicians.
From Current cases:
There may have been more people 20-29 exposed through travelling.
In most places males seem to get it more and die more from it.
COVID-19 – current cases details
Address from the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern:
She gave an inventory of Personal Protection Equipment (PPE) which has been causing some concern.
She reinforces the expectation that case numbers will keep increasing for up yo 10 more days, then hopefully will start to come down.
She asks again “Please stay at home, break the chain, save lives”.
Asked if contingency plans are being made for the possibility the lockdown will extend beyond 4 weeks. A vague response.
Grant Robertson on the wage subsidy:
They are tweaking the scheme some more. This should come out in a media release so I’ll wait for that.
He emphasises that the scheme doesn’t change the need for employers to comply with employment and leave laws.
Your NZ 
lurcher1948
/ 27th March 2020One rich arab, getting super rich landing rights, maybe he has Covid-19
https://t.co/ijSto0LdIo?amp=1
WTF NZ
Patricia
/ 27th March 2020Lurcher, it sounds as though it’s a repatriation exercise “the plane arrived this morning with only five crew on board and was expected to depart later today with four passengers added.”
Duker
/ 27th March 2020So same numbers in hospital …no change. The others are at home , like you would with a flu illness.
oldlaker
/ 27th March 2020“Testing capacity is now over 2,000 a day, but individual tests are decided based on the judgement of clinicians.” I’ve heard that the same strict criteria apply as previously.
In fact, I know of someone in the Hawkes Bay who is ill with the typical CV-19 symptoms and has a flatmate who had close contact with cases from a cruise ship but can’t be tested.
Alan Wilkinson
/ 27th March 2020The age profile may just be showing those who spent longest overseas (OE youth, retirees) got most infections.
Pete George
/ 27th March 2020Pink David
/ 27th March 2020It’s a computer model, so it must be right.
Pete George
/ 27th March 2020Of course not. But it’s got more chance of being closer to being right, especially as it gets refined (as most models are as more becomes known) than random people who comment on the Internet.
Duker
/ 27th March 2020Exactly the no-nothing expert I talked about .
Hes a professor Of Physics whos research was on modelling nano-structures. as mentioned below. He knows nothing about immunology or human viruses and yet you give him creedance …unbelievable
The University has its own Biomedical Statistics Professors who I have listened and he is say ‘ We dont yet Know enough’ Real experts know what they dont know.
https://www.statschat.org.nz/2020/03/23/another-reason-why-we-dont-know-the-covid-19-mortality-rate/
Griff.
/ 27th March 2020Thomas Lumley
Today, the risk is low. There are likely to be under a thousand undetected cases in the country. Any specific person is unlikely to catch Sars-Cov-2 today. However, there are a lot of people in New Zealand and some of them will catch it today.
Without fairly severe controls on personal contact (plus testing), the number of undetected cases, and so the risk, *will* increase every day. The point of the current alerts is that right now we have a chance to keep it low, with the borders closed and no new cases coming in.
If everything goes perfectly, we will find all the cases and the remaining risk will be very low. We can then relax the controls a lot. If everything goes fairly well, we’ll be able to keep up with new clusters and the risk will be fairly low; we can relax the controls to some extent. If we don’t manage to stop spread at individual clusters, it is very unlikely we can hold the number of cases in New Zealand to under a million by milder physical distancing — a million cases would correspond to a ‘flattened’ epidemic with each person infecting an average of about 1.25 other people. With no controls at all, we’d expect three or four million cases *in New Zealand* before the epidemic is over.
You’d need to talk to economists and social workers and so about whether the current interventions are worth a month of lockdown and maybe 18 months with varying alert levels. The ones I follow on Twitter seem to think so.
Duker
/ 27th March 2020A month ago he had no reliable data, and no real world situations to model.
My first job involved in a small way work for a large scale modeling project for Auckland, the initial part involved getting real data from wide ranging surveys and counting cars – it was traffic modelling
This clown has a kitchen table and no idea. These guys arent even statistical majors , Hendy is a Professor of Physics at Auckland
Research areas
Condensed matter physics
Computational materials science
Nanotechnology
The physics of complex systems
Innovation and economics
“My group is interested in the theoretical description and modelling of nanostructures at the atomic scale.”
Yeah right , so hes jumping on a bandwagon
Hes knows SFA about Medical Statistics at deep level , but can play with packaged computer programs on a home desktop computer and write code.
David
/ 27th March 2020Get him to do a climate change model