Covid-19 Omicron outbreak: The virus-blocking measures experts enjoyed least

Public health experts surveyed for a new study found not being able to travel in and outside of New Zealand was their most disliked part of Covid-19 restrictions – but they were least bothered by
masking.

Lockdowns and other coronavirus-curbing interventions delivered New Zealand one of the most successful pandemic responses in the world – perhaps saving thousands of lives and long-term health problems in the process.

But these measures often still came with hardship for Kiwis, from lost income to a hit on mental health observed over lockdown.

What Covid-19 rules New Zealand uses in the wake of the Omicron wave has been revealed by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern today.

In a survey carried out last year and just published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Otago University researchers Dr Dennis Wesselbaum and Professor Paul Hansen asked 16 experts which restrictions they themselves saw as most inconvenient or unpleasant – regardless of how effective they were.

Wesselbaum said while lockdowns had been used to slow the spread of Covid-19, they were also dependent on people complying with them.

“Given policymakers have discretion over which features to include and how stringent to make them, greater understanding of how people feel about the various ways a lockdown can be configured will be useful for policymakers striving for designs that foster high compliance.”

The results found that the surveyed experts – who weren’t identified in the study – ranked the travel-restrictions feature almost four times more inconvenient or unpleasant (24.6 per cent) than being required to wear masks in public (6.5 per cent).

The cost of vaccination through taxes was seen as the second most undesirable feature (22.1 per cent).

School closures (19.4 per cent) and being made to work from home (17.9 per cent) were also relatively undesirable features – yet being being required to stay home (9.6 per cent) was seen as not much worse than the mask requirement.

Wesselbaum said this ranking seemed intuitively plausible, as for most people, wearing a mask was a minor inconvenience compared to the other interventions.

Staying at and working from home should be feasible without too much inconvenience for high-income academics and researchers, he added.

“It is, therefore, not surprising that travel restrictions affecting work and holidays and school closures are the least desirable features.”

He did, however, find the result that participants are willing to give up four months of normal life in order to not experience a year with Covid-19, surprising.

While this research studied the preferences of a select group of public health experts – who were mainly university-educated Pakeha earning more than $100,000 a year – he said it would be interesting to compare these to the preferences of the general public.

“A larger-scale study involving the general population could be conducted in the future, given that Covid-19 and its variants show no sign of disappearing soon.”

Ultimately, he hoped the study would contribute to helping better design lockdowns, to boost compliance while minimising spread.