China, Taiwan and other Asian countries have shown that a massive public health response to Covid-19 works. Now is the time for New Zealand to do the same.
Covid-19 presents an unprecedented challenge for New Zealand and the rest of the world.
Unchecked, the coronavirus causing this disease spreads easily through populations, killing a worryingly high proportion of infected elderly and those with serious underlying medical conditions, and rarely others in the general population. This has led to lockdowns of whole regions within countries, in China and now in Italy. However, New Zealand doesn’t need to have thousands of deaths or lockdowns from Covid-19.
National pandemic plans tend to read like a fighter going into a fight planning to be knocked out. This is because they are based on influenza, which is extremely hard to contain due to its short 1-2 day incubation period and the large number of asymptomatic Influenza A virus shedders.
An influenza epidemic does not respond particularly well to basic public health measures. But the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is not an influenza virus. While China was the first country to encounter this virus, it has also provided us with the answers to containing it, not so much in the lockdown of Wuhan, but in the response across the rest of the country.
China mounted a massive, sophisticated countrywide public health assault on the virus. Dr Bruce Aylward from the WHO described this as 90 percent comprising painstaking identification of cases and isolation of their contacts, tailor-making their response using big data, well-managed staff and by observing the local context of each mini-outbreak.
The results have been remarkable. Despite people from Wuhan in the height of the epidemic travelling all over the country, they have managed to minimise the impact of the virus. Indeed, outside of Wuhan and Hubei province, there have only been 13,152 cases and 114 deaths from Covid-19 reported in a country of around 1.4 billion people, as of March 8. If our public health efforts, which are faced with less complicated incursions of the virus, achieved the equivalent, we would end up with only a handful of cases and no deaths.