Placing New Zealanders on alert for a national lockdown once the covid-19 virus is established here is acting too late, says leading public health expert and communicable diseases professor Michael Baker.
He was speaking after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced, in a nationally televised statement, that the country is now at 'Alert Level 2' in a four-step regime in which a shutdown of all but essential services would only occur at Level 4, after widespread community transmission of the virus has already occurred.
Baker (pictured) says that is too late and that the opportunity still exists to prevent a wave of infections by implementing an aggressive social isolation and testing regime immediately.
"At the moment, we aren't surfing the wave, we're following in its wake," he told BusinessDesk immediately after the Prime Minister's announcement.
Decisive action needed
"That means acting very decisively and things that risk looking like an over-reaction. Nothing is an over-reaction at the moment. They are not doing enough. They have to shut the country down now."
Asked why this advice was being ignored at a press conference immediately after her TV address, Ardern said: "There are public health experts who have said we're doing exactly what we should be doing.
"We are in a unique position where, if we move early enough and strongly enough, we can break down waves into much smaller clusters of cases, but it requires everyone to play their part. Government cannot do this alone."
She indicated that moves to higher alert levels could be swift, albeit potentially limited to areas where community transmission is suspected.
New cases
Of the 52 confirmed cases of covid-19, two of the newest identified in New Zealand have not proven to be traceable to international travel, unlike all previous cases. That may be the first evidence of community transmission: the point at which the virus may start to spread more widely in the community as it has in countries such as Italy, Iran and more recently Australia.
Baker and University of Otago colleague Professor Nick Wilson - both academics with international reputations in the science of response to communicable diseases - have been at odds with public health sector colleagues on the covid-19 response, creating tension late last week by publishing a highly critical commentary of the government's incremental approach to the crisis on the Australian website, The Conversation.
They are understood to have angered Ministry of Health officials for doing so, even as the government modified its message from an attempt to 'flatten the curve' of the outbreak in New Zealand to talk instead of dealing with small 'waves' of outbreaks by containing it. That shift in language is consistent with the independent experts' advice, which they fear is not being adequately heard.
Right place
The director-general of health, Ashley Bloomfield defended the current alert status at today's press conference, saying in the current situation, as defined by the new alert system, "we are at Level 2 and we believe that's the right place to be and it is under very constant review."
"I am talking very regularly with a range of health advisers, my own chief science adviser and the Prime Minister's chief science adviser too.
Ardern said it was important to realise how long the response to the virus might need to be.
"One thing we should remember is that this will be with us for some time, so we have to make sure when we move that we are able to sustain our response. This will not leave in weeks. It will be here for some time."
Baker said governments around the world had consistently underestimated the virus, with the result that they had missed an opportunity still open to New Zealand to contain a rapid spread and potential to overwhelm the public health system with acute cases.
'Too conservative'
"Everyone's being too conservative. They're tip-toeing around because a shutdown would be very inconvenient. Well, it will be bloody inconvenient if we delay acting now and get a sustained epidemic because then we might still be in shutdown in 18 months time," he said.
As an early indication of leadership on how to respond to the level 2 alert, Parliament's Speaker, Trevor Mallard, is expected to announce very shortly that Parliament will meet remotely from now on.
Ardern is basing herself from now on in Wellington to spare non-essential travel and no ministers would be undertaking any overseas travel, she said.
