Covid-19: Children and young people dominating south Auckland Omicron cases

Papakura Marae Health Clinic GP Dr Matire Harwood is seeing a rapid rise in Omicron case numbers and most of them are children.

“Most of them have been kids who have been at school. The numbers are just going up and up and up. And if they aren’t a positive case, they are a close contact,” Harwood said.

She expected the clinic to be dealing with 90 positive Covid-19 cases a day by the end of the week.

“We’re swabbing about 300 people a day and they are close contacts with symptoms.”

Her thoughts were echoed by Manukau GP Dr Api Talemaitoga, who said most of the cases he was seeing were children and young people.

“It’s definitely a different demographic to Delta,” he said.

Talemaitoga said on Wednesday that 20 of the practice’s patients had returned positive tests in the previous 24 hours.

He thinks the reason more children are testing positive is because the vaccine roll-out for 5 to 11-year-olds only started last month, coupled with the fact children are now back at school, which is adding to the rate of transmission.

Counties Manukau DHB (Middlemore) director of population health Dr Gary Jackson said figures showed 19.4 per cent of current Covid cases in the area were aged 0 to 14.

“Within this younger demographic, infections are often asymptomatic which unfortunately does accentuate the spread of Covid, as asymptomatic people can be infectious and still shed virus, but will be largely unaware that they are doing so,” he said.

“In terms of any increases over time, the largest number of cases are in the 15-19 (12 per cent), 20-24 (13 per cent) and 20-29 (12 per cent) age groups, and this has been very steady over the past few weeks.”

That equates to 0 to 29-year-olds accounting for 56.4 per cent of all current cases in Counties Manukau.

“They are the people transmitting it,” Jackson said.

But Jackson said while there was no vaccination available for the under 5s, and most 5 to 11-year-olds had only had one dose of the vaccine so far, it didn’t appear to be placing them at any greater risk during the Omicron outbreak.

Ministry of Health data released to Stuff earlier this month showed children, teenagers and young adults accounted for most of the country’s community Omicron Covid-19 cases early in the outbreak.

The figures showed, from January 23 to February 5, there were 1579 community cases of Covid-19. In that time, the highest number of cases (325) was recorded among the 10 to 19-year-old age group.

University of Auckland epidemiologist Rod Jackson said a high incidence of cases among children in south Auckland was not surprising, as the area had both a younger population and more people living in overcrowded conditions.

But Jackson said the data would be the “tip of the iceberg” and the real number of cases would be much higher.

“Even though kids aren’t as high risk in terms of getting ill, they have a higher risk of getting it and then transmitting it within households.”

He said many children may be asymptomatic, or only show mild symptoms, and as a result this might not show up in the official statistics.