Coronavirus disease — learn the lessons of 1918
Is there no limit to the risks we are willing to take with the lives and health of New Zealanders for the sake of profits from international tourism? Within a few weeks of the totally avoidable tragedy on Whakaari/White Island when tourists were taken into the crater of an increasingly active and obviously dangerous volcano, killing 21 of them, we sit like possums in the headlights waiting for other tourists to bring a lethal disease to our shores while other nations were closing borders.
New Zealand had an excuse when the so-called Spanish Flu arrived in late 1918.
Authorities back then knew very little of microbiology or the real dangers of viral infections. They knew even less about preventive measures or treatments. In about two months 9000 people had died, about half as many of our people who were killed in four years of the First World War. By the end of the pandemic the death toll had more than doubled. No single event before or since has killed so many New Zealanders.
However, unlike the 1918 influenza pandemic which arrived here with little warning, we had ample warning that the newly discovered coronavirus could easily reach New Zealand from China unless we took immediate protective measures. We won’t know how virulent it is or even if it is here until the first case is diagnosed. At that point all protective measures will become meaningless and these days a virus can spread across the world as fast as the passenger jets which carry it. In less than two weeks it has already reached America, Australia, Canada and Europe and, world-wide, more than 6000 people are known to be infected and at least 100 have died. Given the propensity of China to suppress negative news those figures are probably very conservative.
Unbelievably, even though China has placed Wuhan Province, where the virus was first discovered, in lockdown, restricted international travel and Hong Kong closed her borders to Chinese travellers, we still allowed passengers from China to land at our international airports, initially with no obvious attempts at protection than totally useless faced masks. Until recently there were no other screens or checks.
Historically our most effective protection from such known and predictable infections has been our geographic isolation. That protection has been compromised to a significant degree by vast increases in the numbers of people travelling and the speed they travel since 1918, and our unwillingness to restrict tourism for almost any reason.
We have already had a scare with an unexpected death of a person in Te Puke after a trip to China. While health authorities have said the death was ‘very unlikely’ to be due to coronavirus, it very easily could have been.
Almost a week after the outbreak of the disease Auckland and Christchurch International Airports finally had a public health nurse available to take the temperatures of incoming passengers from flights from China who felt unwell. If their temperature was over 38 degrees, they would be offered further advice and assessment. They should not have even be here regardless of their health.
Apart from these inadequate and belated actions our main concern appears to have been the potential impact on the coming summer tourist season and trade with China with a senior Infometrics economist saying it would be at least a month before any impact of the disease outbreak started to come through in official trade statistics. For goodness sake, this is not an unforeseen technical impediment to tourist travel but a deadly disease which kills people. We probably still could and undoubtedly should prevent it from arriving here.
This is not the first deadly virus which has spread world-wide in a very short time. We have seen Ebola, Hong Kong Flu, bird flu, swine flu and HIV Aids and there will, without doubt, others. We still have the time, technology and more than an even chance of keeping this latest virus at bay. Initially we seemed no better able or willing to protect ourselves than we were way back in 1918 before we had instant world-wide communications and jet travel.
If the Wuhan virus had been foot and mouth disease there would have been no hesitation or argument. Borders would have been immediately closed to travellers, including students, from anywhere near the outbreak and they would have remained closed until the all-clear was given no matter how long that took. That should have happened this time but we moved far too slow on this issue and a cure could be months or even years away.
We are probably not facing Armageddon but we can move a great deal faster to prevent any more New Zealanders being exposed to fatal risk at home.