Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister for Food Safety): Today I am thinking of the 687 people affected by COVID in New Zealand the 32 in our hospitals and the eight in intensive care. I am thinking of the seven children under one year who are cases in this outbreak and their families. If we think about this outbreak we've seen the cases peak at 83 on Thursday of last week and we hope now that case numbers are coming down—down at 75 today. Further cause for optimism is that for the last four days more than half of contacts have been linked to a known case.I want to talk about the Delta variant briefly and I did notice Dr Reti's sleight of hand with the science during question time. Yes Delta emerged some time ago—in fact in October last year—and surged in India in May of this year. But our understanding of the parameters of the virus that provide actionable public health intelligence has only come to light recently. Parameters like the incubation period that informs contact tracing systems only published in June—late June the last week of June. And you would have seen the impact that had on the series of advice that we had from Professor Skegg's group. The implication that hospital preparedness should have been changed when it was only last week that we had information published in the Lancet that the rate of hospitalisations was doubled with the Delta outbreak.We do know that Delta is twice as infectious but I want to tell this House today that in many ways our response has been 10 times as strong. We went harder and earlier than ever before moving to alert level 4 on the same day that a case was detected. This has never been done in the pandemic before not imaginable two years ago. But we knew because of the intelligence that we had received on Delta we had to go harder and earlier and we could because we were prepared. We were prepared as a Government but New Zealand business was prepared to move their operations online and shame on the parties so closely proud of their connections to business who were unable to make the transition in our conduct in Parliament moving that online as well. In contact tracing we have traced over 32000 contacts. We are tracing the contacts of contacts so-called second-order contacts after learnings from New South Wales. At one point we had over 500 locations of interest; we're currently down to 344. This is because of the concern about fleeting transmission with the Delta variant yet another way we have responded to changes in the evidence. We are increasing the use of the app. I'm very pleased to see more New Zealanders taking that up. And we did all of this because we were prepared. We scaled up contact tracing in Auckland. We delegated contact tracing electronically to public health units across the country.We then moved to the third phase of our response using centralised contact tracing capacity and deployable public health experts to Auckland. We also trained new contact tracers as was our plan so that we could make use of people not working at alert level 4 and also respond to the particular characteristics of the outbreak which includes bringing on Samoan language - speaking contact tracers. Our testing has surged. In the first week of the outbreak we tested 5 percent of the Auckland population approximately 2 percent of the nationwide population. We had the stocks the people—though they worked really hard to do that—the IT systems and the support from Healthline. We reached these heights because we were prepared and we complemented this with a scale-up in waste-water testing to cover the waste-water supply of 3.9 million New Zealanders. We also surged vaccination pivoting to safe procedures under alert level 4 being able to use excess capacity in primary care being able to use drive-through vaccination clinics because we were prepared.Outbreak preparedness is not about perfection. I remember doing the Advanced Cardiac Life Support certificate when I was a medical registrar at Wellington Hospital. While that training was incredibly important I realised that it only prepared me so much for the day I had to run an arrest call when the hospital sprinklers went off simultaneously making safe use of the defibrillator impossible. That day was tough and it's a reminder that preparedness while it's so important cannot simulate every possible scenario. It is the same with outbreaks—decisions need to be made with imperfect information. But name a service in the health system that can scale up to demand tenfold like our testing system has done or go from zero to 32000 like our contact tracing system has done. We had a plan we were ready and we're executing that plan.