Government secures Covid treatment, unvaccinated will impact surgeries

Health Minister Andrew Little has said that large numbers of unvaccinated people receiving Covid-19 will put pressure on our health care system, leading to the removal of planned surgeries.

Little also announced that the government has gained access to a new Covid drug, Ronapreve, which will help treat people with “treat people with moderate to severe symptoms.”

Pharmac has obtained enough Ronapreve to treat 5,300 people and hopes to be able to purchase more next year, he said.

Talk to TVNZ Q + A Along with Jack Tame, Little responded to concerns that unvaccinated people would start clogging hospitals across the country, forcing hospitals to cancel scheduled procedures.

“If we don’t have a 90% immunization rate of the eligible population and we see both vaccinated and unvaccinated people show up – mostly unvaccinated people going to the hospital in large numbers – it puts pressure. on our hospitals.

“This means that the people who have planned care, planned surgeries, they are left out of the system and hospitals have to redefine their priorities,” Little said.

He said the system had to take care of Covid patients and people who had scheduled procedures for people “often in excruciating pain”.

Little said the current Covid outbreak has accelerated so quickly that it has forced the government to advance its two-month home isolation plans.

Previously, almost all Covid patients were placed in a quarantine facility. But the size of the current outbreak means hundreds of people have now started to self-isolate at home.

“Our public health service, especially in Auckland, is under pressure.

“This is an outbreak that has had numbers far beyond what was expected even a few weeks later,” Little said.

“We are now over 3,200 cases, there are almost 1,700 active cases in place, well over 600 people isolated at home,” he said.

“We expected to be in this position in six weeks to two months – everything must have been brought forward.”

The government has faced criticism from National for its decision to dismantle the DHB system as part of its healthcare reforms.

Little said the current outbreak reinforces the need for a more uniform national health service.

He congratulated the Auckland DHBs on their performance, but did not say that the other DHBs had performed so well.

“Three levels of performance differed in our DHBs even before the pandemic,” Little said.

“If you look at the rollout of the vaccination, you can see different levels of success,” he said.

“Different DHBs have taken different approaches and achieved different results.”

On access to the new drug Covid, Little said in a statement: “Ronapreve is a monoclonal antibody drug and there is a lot of enthusiasm about it. Clinical advice is that this is a breakthrough. massive because it reduces the severity of COVID -19 and decreases the risk of patients passing the virus on to other people.

“This is extremely important, not only because of the lives it could directly save, but also because it will take the pressure off our hospitals, which means they can continue to treat people with other conditions.”