Prof: NZ was ‘spectacularly complacent’

WELLINGTON: New Zealand’s health system was so poorly prepared to keep out Covid19 that the country has had to endure extraordinary sacrifices to stamp it out, the Epidemic Response Committee heard yesterday.

‘‘We squandered our major advantage, which was geography,’’ University of Auckland professor Des Gorman, who is advising the committee, said.

‘‘The hard work we need to do to stamp it out is because we had failed to keep it out.’’

New Zealand should have closed its borders in midFebruary, not the end of March, he said, but we did not have to resources to do so.

‘‘We went into this pandemic profoundly underprepared and when we should have closed the borders hard, we couldn’t.’’

Being properly resourced meant being able to call on the army and police to set up motels, and even a tented village.

‘‘If you haven’t sorted that out beforehand, the likelihood to do it on Wednesday afternoon at 3pm is pretty skinny.

‘‘I think we were spectacularly complacent. Our casualness, born out of ‘that’s a problem over there’, has left us figuratively with our pants down.’’

The Government asked most overseas arrivals from March 16 to selfisolate, and from March 20 all nonNew Zealanders were not allowed into the country.

A quarantine for all symptomatic overseas arrivals was put in place from March 26, when the Level 4 lockdown started, and was expanded to a blanket quarantine from April 10.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern rejected Prof Gorman’s comments, saying New Zealand was among the first countries in the world to close its borders to foreigners.

‘‘At a point we were able to manage a system where everyone was quarantined, keeping in mind we had tens of thousands of people returning in those early days, we moved to that.’’

More than 70,000 New Zealanders had returned from overseas since March 16, and there were only an estimated 43,000 hotel rooms in the country.

Ms Ardern had also previously expressed concerns about possibly turning a quarantine site into a Petri dish where a handful of cases could have become a major outbreak.

She said the counterargument to Prof Gorman’s was the good position New Zealand was now in, where Covid19 was seemingly wellcontained.

‘‘If that’s his claim about where we stood, then how is it we’ve managed to produce what we have?’’

Directorgeneral of health Ashley Bloomfield said the Ministry of Health had constantly asked itself what was needed in two weeks’ time and then tried to put that in place immediately.

‘‘The proof’s in the pudding. For an underprepared or illprepared country, we’ve done remarkably well — and I don’t think we were illprepared.’’

Prof Gorman said New Zealanders arriving from overseas who tested negative could have been sent home but in a ‘‘low trust’’ environment, with measures such as having someone checked on the moment they turned off their phone.

‘‘Public health measures have failed all around the world because they keep assuming that humans behave consistently rationally.

‘‘People don’t make rational decisions.’’

He said Australia had 10 intensive care unit beds per 100,000 people and Germany had 33, but New Zealand had only three.

‘‘[If] you want to know how underresourced we are, that’s a living example. ‘‘If you can’t manage a pandemic then for goodness sake keep it out of society.’’

The committee heard from frontline healthcare and community care workers about the need for Government support and access to personal protection equipment (PPE).

Prof Gorman, a former dean of Auckland Medical School, told the committee New Zealand was unprepared to adequately test and contact trace at the start of the Covid19 pandemic, despite the recent global experience with Sars.

He said the use of the term ‘‘elimination’’ was ‘‘a silly way to use language which disengages people’’.

‘‘We’re talking absolute gibberish. If we’re going to engage them, let’s use common language and common usage.’’

He said a vaccine would provide widespread elimination, and until then ‘‘the best we can hope for is disease control’’.

He also criticised the way the healthcare system was structured and funded.

Reform was needed in the way health services were commissioned, bought and funded, he said.

He said the existing system of 20 autonomous district health boards was too focused on provincialism and lacked a way to connect the DHBs nationally.

The system was ‘‘inherently counterinnovative’’ and flexibility was needed.

There was now an opportunity to ‘‘accelerate system reform’’, and maybe even the bipartisanship required to achieve it.

However, he said he had to temper his enthusiasm; the last comprehensive reform of this country’s health system, in his mind, was in 1938. — The New Zealand Herald

❛ We squandered our major advantage, which

was geography