Thank you to all the midwives in Aotearoa for your role in supporting a health-based pandemic response. As data from the last three years continues to roll in on many metrics, the graph below demonstrates what we have gained as a country.

The graph has been generated from Tübingen University researcher Dimitry Kobak’s calculations of excess mortality from World Health Organization data. Excess mortality is a measure of the proportion of additional deaths in a given time period compared to expected or average death rates for that period. For example, if it would be usual for a country to have an average of 1,000 deaths in a given week and 1,200 were recorded, this would be 200 excess deaths. The measure refers to all-cause mortality, so takes into account not only deaths due to Covid-19 but also any other effects of the pandemic or other events during the time period in question.

In Aotearoa, there have been fewer cumulative (total) deaths than the average in the three years from the beginning of the pandemic to January this year. According to these data, we are the only country out of 23 high income countries with this outcome – all others had more total deaths than expected during these three years. This means there are many people alive today who would not have been if our public policy had followed that of other OECD countries.

As Ian Powell (NZ Doctor, 21 February 2023) points out, the reasons that so many New Zealanders’ lives have been prolonged are:

• Public health measures based on a strategy of elimination (not mitigation) of Covid-19 transmission
• Strategy involved lockdown and border restrictions
• Rapid implementation of elimination strategy
• Very low rates of influenza and mortality due to this during border restrictions
• World-leading vaccination roll-out and a high rate of full vaccine coverage

Midwives continued to provide midwifery care in hospitals, birthing units and the community throughout the pandemic response, including lockdowns. You did this in service to the whānau who needed ongoing care. You did this at a time of huge uncertainty about what Covid-19 was and how much transmission was occurring. You provided care wearing PPE for long hours, and still do when someone is Covid-19 positive in labour. These data are just one example, but a very important one, of why we needed to do what we did as a health system and a country.

Graph reproduced with permission from NZ Doctor.