Covid-19 coming through the trans-Tasman bubble was probably inevitable, analyst Dr Rawiri Taonui says.
He was commenting after Wellington moved to Alert Level 2 off the back of a traveller from Australia testing positive for coronavirus.
Queues are now building in Wellington as people line up to get tested for Covid-19 and supermarket customers are hoarding toilet paper again.
The restriction is expected to last until midnight this Sunday, and means gatherings will be limited to 100 people, social distancing will be observed in public places and masks remain compulsory on public transport.
Taonui says one of the problems with the trans-Tasman bubble is there aren't sufficiently high levels of vaccination in either country.
"So, although we've administered one million vaccines, we've still only fully inoculated 7.5% of the population,” Taonui says.
He points to a second issue with the trans-Tasman bubble, the numbers.
“The bubble has been going for nine weeks, and there have been 175,000 people cross the Tasman and enter New Zealand. The last two weeks, the numbers have actually increased from about 19,000 a week to 21,000 last week.”
“We're dealing with hyper infectious variants on both sides of the Tasman."
"The Delta variant (formerly known as the Indian variant) is now the dominant arriving variant in New Zealand. We've had 11 of those variants arrive in New Zealand altogether,” Taonui says.
New Zealand is dealing with a third and fourth generation of variants, which basically have two characteristics, he says. The Alpha (formerly known as the British variant) is hyper infectious, roughly about 56% more infectious than the earliest strains of Covid-19. The other variants, Beta and Gamma (formerly known as the South African and Brazilian variants) are able to evade human antibodies.
So, if you have previously been sick with Covid-19, you would have antibodies but they're able to evade some of the antibodies produced by vaccines.
“The Delta variant has both characteristics, and it's actually more infectious than the Alpha strain, and it's able to evade some of the antibodies that are produced by the vaccines."
"That in itself is another problem because the Pfizer vaccine we're using is probably still the best vaccination but it's about 85-90% effective but the vaccine the Australians are using is only about 80%, effective,” Taonui says.
"So this is very dangerous, it’s probably the most dangerous variant to emerge and is part of what we might call a new fourth generation of variants."