What to expect next

Medical experts are warning people to brace for a wave of Covid-19 cases from a Waikato music festival that’s been dubbed a superspreader event.

Five Aucklanders who attended Soundsplash during the weekend have tested positive to Covid-19 – one with the Omicron variant.

Sixty-eight people are considered close contacts so far.

Canterbury University Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Arindam Basu, said the aftermath of the event was going to be ‘‘very serious’’ and he expected hundreds of cases to result from the festival over the next 2-3 weeks.

Two key factors pointed to the potential for a large number of cases – few in the predominantly young crowd were likely to have received a booster shot, and the close contact nature of concerts.

‘‘It is going to be very serious particularly with Omicron as we do not know how much Omicron is already circulating in the New Zealand population.

‘‘Let’s say a few people with the Omicron variant attended that festival and passed it onto the others, particularly with concerts there is a high risk because concerts basically mean that . . . people get excited, they’ll start shouting, crowding . . . each of these are individual risk factors which multiply,’’ Basu said.

The festival, open to those aged 16 years and older, is believed to have attracted up to 8000 people.

Festival-goers reported people jumping the fence, with one sharing a vape with a man who told her he was unvaccinated.

Basu said infections were more likely if people were asymptomatic.

‘‘These are definitely multispreader events if not a super spreader event.

‘‘If people are unvaccinated

and get infected, they will definitely infect other people . . . in terms of risk assessment these are significantly risky events to have unvaccinated people coming in,’’ he said.

University of Auckland microbiologist, Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles, weighed in on social media, saying it was ‘‘pretty likely’’ that positive cases would be the outcome. ‘‘Brace yourself New Zealand. ‘‘Looks like [we] might have had a very big superspreader event. Word of warning – nasal swabs may miss about 1/10 positives with Omicron so if you have symptoms and test negative you may still be infected.

‘‘People crammed together singing along to bands seems pretty likely to result in transmission to me,’’ Wiles said.

The festival was held in the final days of the orange setting before detected community Omicron transmission moved the country to red and halted gatherings of more than 100.

Basu said the settings were designed for the Delta variant and he understood the need for potential changes to the current settings to deal with Omicron.

‘‘Once they started drafting those plans . . . Omicron suddenly burst onto the scene, and we’ve seen what’s happened with Omicron in Europe and in Australia for that matter.

‘‘It became clear that we were dealing with a virus that was much more contagious than Delta, far more associated with reinfections and so there needed to be some kind of adjustment to initial red, orange and green specifications,’’ he said.

Basu said that in hindsight, the delivery of vaccines could have been quicker.

‘‘The only thing that you could have done at that point was to increase the delivery of the third vaccination, but that was only known when Omicron started surfacing in South Africa, so the other thing would have been to increase the pace of vaccinations,’’ he said.

Anyone who was at Soundsplash between Friday, January 21, and Sunday, January 23, is asked to self-monitor for symptoms until Wednesday, February 2, and get a test if any appear.

‘‘These are significantly risky events to have unvaccinated people coming in.’’

Arindam Basu

Canterbury University Associate Professor of Epidemiology