Covid research fund for future health planning
Ōtautahi - New Zealand researchers studying the covid pandemic are being invited to apply for grants from a new $9 million fund.Tens of thousands of lives have been saved in New Zealand because of the way this country has responded covid.
Aotearoa has the lowest death rate in the OECD, well below that of other countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States and even Australia.
New Zealand needs to build on what it has learnt from the last two years to help plan for future pandemics and to improve health services.
Funds are available to look at how the methods used to get four million people vaccinated against covid can be used in other vaccination programmes.
It was the largest vaccination programme ever seen in the country. A request for proposals for research opens on April 19 and closes on June 10. Initial details are on GETS, the government’s electronic tenders services website.
The $9 million fund comes from the government’s $74.1 billion COVID-19 response fund.
Globally, The BA.2 subvariant of the Omicron variant is now dominant worldwide. BA.2 accounts for nearly 86 percent of all sequenced cases, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
It's thought to be even more transmissible than other Omicron subvariants BA.1 and BA.11 but isn't thought to be more likely to cause severe disease. Last month, WHO warned the pandemic is far from over.
Meanwhile, Google plans to use smartphones to monitor health, with the company saying it would test whether capturing heart sounds and eyeball images could help people identify issues from home.
Covid remains a grave threat to human health worldwide. Deficiencies in surveillance methods have allowed the coronavirus to spread silently in numerous countries.
The resulting explosion of exponential growth at the community level has already overwhelmed the health care systems in places such as Italy and is poised to do so elsewhere as well.
Lisa was born in Auckland at the start of the 1970s, living in a small campsite community on the North Shore called Browns Bay. She spent a significant part of her life with her grandparents, often hanging out at the beaches. Lisa has many happy memories from those days at Browns Bay beach, where fish were plentiful on the point and the ocean was rich in seaweed. She played in the water for hours, going home totally “sun-kissed.” “An adorable time to grow up,” Lisa tells me.
Lisa enjoyed many sports; she was a keen tennis player and netballer, playing in the top teams for her age right up until the family moved to Wellington. Lisa was fifteen years old, which unfortunately marked the end of her sporting career. Local teams were well established in Wellington, and her attention was drawn elsewhere.