We all know that Dunedin student housing is not exactly the best. So what happens when you introduce a highly transmissible virus to a population that lives in cold, damp flats? Critic wanted to know how our unique housing situation would affect the spread of Omicron in our community, so we reached out to Dr. Lucy Telfar-Barnard, a PhD Senior Research Fellow at Kairuruku Matua Department of Public Health on Otago’s Wellington campus.
“I’m exactly the right person to be talking to,” she said. And that she is: Lucy reports regularly on “New Zealand’s respiratory disease burden” and has also researched home ventilation, as well as Covid-19. If there was anyone who could answer our question, it was her.
One of the first things that Lucy told us was that a recent analysis rated the health quality of Dunedin housing as “the worst in the country”. She clarified that “it's not a perfect measure, but it's an indicator of where we’re at.” Anyone who lives here is familiar with this, with draughts, drips and general dirtiness being very much the norm in Dunedin. And shockingly, none of these features make your home any more resilient to Omicron.
Before explaining how the homes affect the spread of the virus, Lucy explained that poor student housing conditions have a lot to do with a broader power imbalance in the rental system. There are nice flats out there, sure, but Lucy mused that students may not be renting these places because there are just cheaper options, and students aren’t exactly loaded. “How desperate are they when they’re renting?” she asked. “Will they take [a dingy flat] because they're desperate?” The answer seems like a yes.
Factors like poor insulation and a lack of heating lead to something that Lucy called “functional crowding”. Sure, you may only have five people in your flat, but if you all have to huddle around the same tiny heater, you’re going to be exposed to a much higher load of germs than you would if all five of you could stay in your own rooms. That’s the first big way that Dunedin housing promotes the spread of Omicron.
The second is a lack of ventilation. The same reason that Dunedin flats are great for hotboxing means that they’re awful for dispelling an airborne virus: stuff just lingers. In the winter, when your already-cold flat is even colder (one flat told Critic that “we don’t even have to refrigerate our milk”), opening the window seems like a terrible idea. In this way, we’re lucky that the virus arrived in summer, when people are already enjoying a nice breeze. “In general, yes”, agreed Lucy, “I’d rather it didn't come here at all, but [arriving in summer will] certainly help avoid overwhelming the hospitals.”
But pushing back the curve doesn’t come without consequence. Lucy said that we may be in “for a cracker of a winter”. When Lucy looked at the “trajectory for this wave, spreading it out does mean that it pushes the peak through March when the weather can be quite changeable. We often see a bump just after Easter for respiratory infections, so there's potential there for it to give us a bit of a kick.”
With damp conditions comes mould. “A lot of people have respiratory responses to mould as well,” Lucy told us. “So when that virus comes through and says to your immune system ‘hi, here I am, I’m here to multiply’, because your lungs are potentially irritated because of the mould and the cold, then it's easier for that virus to replicate and attack. There's a risk of a worse outcome,” she said. But she wasn’t entirely conclusive when it came to specifics. “There has not been work done in this area yet. I guess I should be doing that. But right now we're dealing with the ‘oh my god this is all terrible’ phase.”
There’s also the problem of shared saliva, which is not so much a Dunedin housing problem as it is a Dunedin human problem. Lucy agreed that, in general, the “safe sex” approach made a lot of sense for avoiding the spread of the virus at parties: limit the numbers, use protection, and get tested. “But try to have an outdoor party if you can, which makes it not like the safe sex things,” said Lucy.
Parties often see the sharing of drinks and balls and cards, but one thing Lucy hadn’t considered was the sharing of vapes. We had to clarify that we didn’t just mean sharing between one or two people, either. We wanted to know what the consequences were of Dunedin’s extremely liberal approach to vape ownership. “Oh gosh, I didn’t even know they did that, ew,” said Lucy. Critic is always happy to shed light on potential new areas of research. “That's a bad idea. You're sharing your saliva one way or another. So don't do that,” said Lucy. “Yes, even if another person has a flavour that you want to try.” Remember, kids: sharing a hoon gives the virus a boom.
Lucy compared the current situation to a different outbreak from a few years ago: “Remember back in the day when people said ‘don't share drink bottles because glandular fever is going around schools’? It’s just like that. You don't want to share the contents of your mouth with someone else. I’m not gonna turn into a parent about who you’re snogging, but whatever. That's something else to think about. Ask to take a RAT before you share spit.”
Dunedin’s already abysmal housing conditions will boost the spread of Omicron in a few ways: the lack of ventilation leads to a built-up viral load, the lack of heating can lead to functional crowding, and the already-mouldy conditions can predispose your immune system to weakness. All of these factors conspire to build a student population that is specifically vulnerable to this new and contagious virus. But Covid isn’t the only illness in Dunedin: seasonal flu has a heydey here whenever it comes to town. And while the usual viral suspects haven’t made headlines, perhaps the spread of Omicron will force a much-needed change in Dunedin’s rental market.
“The building code is being reviewed right now,” said Lucy. “The proposed improvements are still far less than they should be, they're not improving requirements for wall insulation for example. The level of improvement in the building code is pitiful. We should be building for a standard that recognizes the 15-20 year environment we’ll be living in rather than doing some mediocre upgrades to new builds - that really isn’t addressing the problem. And that’s just new builds, and most homes in New Zealand are not new builds.” The Healthy Homes initiative was definitely a step in the right direction, but Lucy said that she doesn’t know how much of a difference it’s made yet. These regulations mean that old flats may have to renovate some out-of-date infrastructure, but unless you check if your flat is up-to-code yourself, there’s no guarantee.
“I wish I could say I knew what can be done in the short term,” said Lucy, “but we don't know at this stage.” She clarified that this was a matter of “how”, not “what”, and that while the needs have been identified, the means have not. “We need affordable energy so we can heat our homes, and we need homes that will retain the heat that’s put in them even when they’re ventilated appropriately. What we don’t know is how to achieve the things we need.”
Heating and ventilation are a double threat. It comes down to energy poverty, said Lucy. “A huge chunk of students' money is going to rent and they can't afford to pay a power bill, even if the landlords put in a nice new heat pump.” In an area where renters are poor, good rentals are pricey, and average conditions are paltry at best, finding cheap heat is often a scavenger’s task. But although we have a time-old solution to this, it’s one which Lucy admonished: “No”, she said, “I would not advise burning couches indoors. The off-gassing from couches would not be especially healthy. The smoke inhalation as well, ha. I don't know what the solution is there.”
In the meantime, while it’s warm, the solution is open windows and common sense. When it’s cold, reliable, cheap heating and good insulation are imperative. And while many of these solutions are either not mandated or too pricey for the average student, legislation is in development that could bring relief to people in flats as dingy as yours. A WoF system for rentals, for example, or a new building code that actually looks for preemptive solutions. But these systems weren’t in place in time to slow the spread of Omicron, or any of the other seasonal illnesses we’re in for.
Dunedin student housing is at the bottom of the barrel, and while Omicron may not be the biggest risk to the average, immuno-normative student, the fact that it’s suddenly everywhere will put a massive burden on our health system. You might not need to go to the hospital for Covid, but what happens when you take a tumble off the roof, or drink too much, or come down with some other illness? An overwhelmed health system may not be able to provide you with the care that you’d expect, and if it gets to that point, there’ll be no doubt that our atrocious housing conditions contributed to the problem.