95bFM Academic — Covid-19 Inquiry inadequately discusses long COVID and disproportionately impacting Māori and Pacific people
8 January, 2025
Interview by Evie Richardson, adapted by Alex Fox
Last month, the Royal Commission of Inquiry into COVID-19 was released.
The report looks into the lessons learnt during the pandemic and features 39 recommendations within the 713-page report.
These recommendations explore a number of social, economic, and health impacts of the pandemic, how the government responded, and how the country could be better prepared for future pandemics.
The report also touches on the positive and negative moves taken by the government, and how these choices could have been more efficient.
Research fellow at the University of Auckland’s Liggins Institute, Dr Anna Brooks, told 95bFM’s The Wire that the report has a worrying blindspot when it comes to the ongoing effects of the pandemic.
“[The Inquiry] does not seem to spotlight the ongoing impacts during a pandemic, and that [would] include or focus on the non-acute part of [the] infection, and how that is impacting people”.
Brooks says the lack of recommendations for ongoing monitoring is “alarming”.
“The virus is still with us. It's still circulating. It is still causing illness. It is still causing death. COVID is very much still here, and while the virus is circulating, more people will be impacted in some way by infection.”
Brooks believes the Inquiry inadequately engages with the long-lasting implications of COVID-19.
“There's a whole slew of health problems that may come from this virus that we really need to be watching more closely.”
“We should have systems in place to be tracking long-term impacts.”
“There are no distinctive recommendations within this document to indicate that [taking into concern the long-term implications of COVID-19 will be] done better in future pandemics.”
Māori and Pacific people were disproportionately affected during the pandemic, being over twice more likely to pass away due to a COVID-19 infection as opposed to Pākehā and other ethnicities.
Considering this, Brooks is calling for more engagement in this area to better improve health outcomes for those disadvantaged.
“We don't really have a good understanding of the prevalence in this subject, because we're not tracking.”
“The early studies did indicate, yes, that there is going to be a burden in Māori and Pacific communities, but unless we get a full national approach to understand how far and wide that is, and what that prevalence looks like, we are not really going to get the numbers or what that scale looks like.”
Ultimately, Brooks is waiting for a clearer message as to how the recommendations will be implemented — something she believes is missing from the Inquiry.
“One of the clear blind spots has been the fact that there were no clear pathways; still no clear pathways for people impacted by COVID-19.”
