Māori COVID-19 Outcomes

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated health inequities between Māori and other New Zealanders. These inequities were predicted by early disease outcome modelling, demonstrated after the second outbreak, and inspired a robust equity-driven vaccination prioritisation strategy the Government was slow to adopt. Central Government’s failure to pro-actively focus on preventing inequity has been the subject of two High Court cases and an urgent Treaty of Waitangi hearing. The predicted inequity occurred and is now routinely reported at a national level in Crown health data.

This is the first report on Māori COVID-19 outcomes to use Crown data to highlight potential focuses of Crown action to improve outcomes for Māori. We put a Te Tiriti lens on the available data to also provide information on how policy amenable factors relate to COVID-19 outcomes, with the aim of identifying potential policy targets that could reduce future health inequities faced by Māori. The report begins with a demonstration of the inequity between Māori/non-Māori and the association of these inequities with area-based social deprivation as measured by the NZ Deprivation Index. However, the intent of this report is to highlight government policy targets, so we then examine whether household and individual factors are associated with good or poor outcomes for Māori specifically.

This report uses data in the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to quantify and examine inequities with respect to four COVID-19 outcomes: testing positive, hospitalisations, deaths, and vaccination status. This involves all the available data in the IDI for the entire duration of the pandemic in Aotearoa (as at October 2023) that can be linked at an individual level. This is the first time such a comprehensive analysis of COVID-19 inequity for Māori has been done in Aotearoa.