6. Question No. 6—COVID-19 ResponseDr ELIZABETH KEREKERE (Green) to the Minister for COVID-19 ResponseQuestion No. 6—COVID-19 Response6. Dr ELIZABETH KEREKERE (Green) to the Minister for COVID-19 Response: Is he confident the current COVID-19 response settings are informed by best evidence on how to protect people from this virus without using lockdowns? SPEAKER: Before I call the member can I just ask the people who are running the TV system having Dr Woods as a background is probably not the best use of the time. Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): Thank you Mr Speaker. Yes. The Government's overall response to COVID-19 has put the safety and interests of all New Zealanders squarely at its centre combined with input from experts and the latest evidence which has meant that New Zealand has had one of the lowest hospitalisation and death rates as a result of COVID-19 in the world. Dr Elizabeth Kerekere: What steps is the Government taking to protect the health and safety of especially health workers who may be exposed to COVID-19 at their workplace? Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Our hospitals and our health system as a whole have good training and good knowledge around infection prevention and control and our experts have been working with them to ensure that they have access to all of the resources that they need. So if I think about N95 masks for example we have been making sure that we have a plentiful supply of those for our front-line health workforce and that includes in the broader health workforce—so places like aged residential care those working to provide health services to those with disabilities and so on have access to N95 masks. In terms of other workers we've been making sure they've had access to what we colloquially call the surgical masks—so those ones with the blue frontages—which are also very very effective. In addition to that we have put in place a Close Contact Exemption Scheme which means that only those who absolutely have to go back to work should be going back to work if they have a household contact who has COVID-19 because that also helps to keep them and others safe in the workplace. Dr Elizabeth Kerekere: Further to that what steps has the Government taken to ensure that supply of N95 masks or equivalent are distributed to the rest of the New Zealanders during the Omicron outbreak? Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: There is a limited supply of N95 masks and they are of course significantly more expensive than the other masks that we have available. So the workforces that they have been supplied to include aged residential care facilities disability support services homecare support services mental health and addiction services and pharmacy who have been able to access them through the Ministry of Health. Others of course are able to purchase their own but as I indicated it is more expensive. To ensure that people have access to quality masks though those other surgical masks have been available and the Ministry of Health has been working to make them available through the Ministry of Education and through the Ministry of Social Development where they're being distributed to organisations like food banks and other avenues. Te Arawhiti have been working with iwi providers to make sure they're available. The Ministry for Pacific Peoples have been making them available including through church networks; the Ministry for Ethnic Communities have them available; and around 750000 masks have been made available to community health providers who are servicing wide regional networks as a one-off supply. So we have been making sure that there are appropriate masks available for the particular context. Dr Elizabeth Kerekere: Is he aware that tamariki Māori in rural areas have the lowest vaccination rate of all children and if so does he intend to urgently increase resources to Māori providers for vaccine outreach? Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: Yes I am aware of that statistic and it is a stat that we should all be concerned about. We have put significant additional resourcing into our Māori health providers in order to try and reach into some of those communities. It is a more challenging group of people to reach and we need to be patient there. One of the things that I'm acutely aware of is that the feedback we get from those communities is that they don't want to be stigmatised by the discussion of vaccination and that also we are experiencing quite significant pockets of vaccine hesitancy and misinformation in those communities and the best way to approach that is carefully and patiently and that is exactly what those health providers are doing and they have our full support to do that.Dr Elizabeth Kerekere: What advice if any has he received on instituting a test-to-stay policy for close contacts in schools and early childhood centres as has been used overseas to limit classroom transmission?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: That is something that we keep under close review. One of the things that we have stressed to schools and early learning services is that they should only be accessing the Close Contact Exemption Scheme for their staff where that is an absolute last resort because in most cases in fact schools and early childhood services will have other things that they can do to keep those people who have a household contact who has COVID-19 out of the workplace. In terms of the broader student population though that is something that we are keeping under review and it may well be that as we sort of head towards the peak of this particular Omicron outbreak we do more in that area.Dr Elizabeth Kerekere: Is he confident that the community care available during phase 3 will be able to identify people who need hospitalisation including due to low oxygen levels and provide timely hospital transfers?Hon CHRIS HIPKINS: This is of course one of the things that we have worked through very very carefully. There is no system that is absolutely foolproof here and we do rely on people self-monitoring for symptoms—and reporting back in where their symptoms start to change. So a really really important message for anybody who is at home isolating because they have COVID-19: if their symptoms worsen if they are starting to experience significant health impacts then ring 111. That is exactly what they should do because we want to make sure that they're getting the healthcare that they need. It is important that for those who have relatively mild symptoms that they stay home and they get better and they make sure that those health services are available to those who really need them whose symptoms could be getting worse.