Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

The population of America that time was around 90 million, lot of news networks fail to mention it.

Someone in this thread last week predicted we would get below 1000 this week. 892 today, I didn't think we would for some months, fair play we are in the right direction.

It really hasn't made much difference so far in terms of positive swabs, test numbers down alright, likely to reflect the change.

Will take a few days to see what the testing levels are like

Either way does anyone really care anymore what the daily cases are

Today

Last week

Has anyone any theories as to why numbers are dropping but hospital cases creeping up ?

There's been a pretty strong link between anything opening and cases going up, then things closing and cases going down, schools no exception apart from the fact that most school age people aren't that vulnerable to SARS-COV2. Schools are also the last thing to close and first to open in a priority order of getting a country up and running, so if we want retail, cinema, offices, construction etc. open, then schools need to be open safely first.

I dont know why that would be funny?

Either way, that is a misleading article, Jacinda explicitly said in that press conference that we are not dropping the zero covid policy

You have a strange sense of humour. NZ will have to move on from zero covid eventually. But it has worked very well for them.

The positivity for close contacts in schools was very low anyway, less than 5%. So cases aren't suddenly going to plummet from not testing close contacts in schools.

People were complaining how often kids were being tested and missing school. Now they don't have to miss school unless they are sick.

Kids are not particularly susceptible to becoming very ill with covid and most of the population are vaccinated which further reduces the risk of transmission and infection.

It was the right decision to stop testing close contacts in schools. It was not a significant source of cases.

That study is complete junk even to my untrained eye, it doesn't account for restrictions or lockdowns and says this in it's conclusion making it read like a propaganda piece:

Sorry but I disagree with you on this occasion and agree with JP100.

I have said all along that this decision is not a good one for children and for observation of the main group left unvaccinated .

I totally agree that if they are not sick / symptomatic they should not have to stay out from school but some caution is needed .

If my kids were young I would want to know if they were close contacts and if they were likely to pick it up , so I could protect them if I chose to .

I certainly would want to know in case they were to come in contact with anybody elderly or immunocompromised.

It is not good enough to allow it to go through the younger age group who have no voice or control in this situation.

As it is, hospitalisations of young children has increased quite a bit in the last six weeks .

Still not a large amount but more than we had in the first wave , or even latterly in the second . And a few have been very sick indeed .

They may not thank us for this in the future

Contact tracing was rolled back from schools because the risk to asymptomatic children was deemed to be too low to keep them off school. It wasn't a decision made on a whim. The number of close contacts from schools testing positve is very low. And word likely spreads quickly if there is a case in someone's class.

Kids still have to isolate and get a test if they are have a household close contact because theyre at a greater risk of infection.

Decisions can't be made on opinions or feelings. There was plenty of data from schools to make that decision.

As of this morning, there were 349 people in hospital with Covid19