The Health Minister has today announced millions of dollars for Pharmac to secure vital medicine amid fears of a global shortage.
Not content with eliminating community transmission of Covid-19 in the country, Chris Hipkins says the $150 million spend over two years is due to the rising cost of medicines, with virus-related drugs costing around 70 percent more than they did before the pandemic.
The minister says the money is coming out of the Covid Response and Recovery Fund, and there's also extra cash for more ventilators and personal protective equipment.
Mr Hipkins says he doesn't want to be caught out by another outbreak. Today there was just one new case of Covid-19, and that person is a woman in her 30s who arrived last week from London via Doha and is in quarantine in Auckland.
There are 27 active cases in the country and none are in hospital. Director General of Health Ashley Bloomfield says the current situation is clearly due to the strict lockdown, and that's also why the general influenza rates are between 20 and 30 percent lower than usual.
But he says he's concerned at the low level of testing currently in New Zealand, and fresh efforts will be made to provide free tests to anyone who visits a doctor with respiratory symptoms, including on weekends.
Dr Bloomfield warned things could escalate, as happened in Melbourne, if people keep declining tests when they are offered.
Today Melbourne had its second worst day with 374 new cases and three deaths. With talk of a new vaccine coming out of Oxford University in the UK, the Minister admitted that New Zealand couldn't actually cope with a mass immunisation programme and it's time to start working on it now.
Despite the announcement of more funding for medicines, he couldn't be clear about where this country sits in the international pecking order to obtain the vaccine.
Dr Bloomfield says New Zealand hasn't paid anything for the Oxford vaccine as it hasn't been fully proven yet, but the government is taking advice on a range of options. As for testing at the border, the Director General of Health says a programme is now underway to test people working in managed isolation facilities.
There remains no evidence of community transmission, and it has now been 81 days since a case of Covid-19 was acquired locally from an unknown source.
