NZ ‘week away’ from Italy-style meltdown

New Zealand was ‘‘literally a week away’’ from not being able to contain coronavirus, when the nation went into lockdown.

The startling revelation has been made by Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners’ medical director Dr Bryan Betty, who said New Zealand was staring down the barrel of a ‘‘potential health system meltdown’’ similar to those seen in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

‘‘At that stage, we could see what happened when you lose control,’’ Betty said.

Betty, a member of the Ministry of Health’s Technical Advisory Group which had oversight of the Covid-19 national response, outlined the claim in a letter sent to GPs on Thursday night.

‘‘We’ve stepped into a world where the normal modern medical defences – vaccines and antibiotics – are not at our disposal,’’ Betty wrote.

‘‘We’ve had to confront this (currently) untreatable disease in the same way our parents and grandparents once faced other viruses – by practising physical distancing and good hand hygiene.’’

Speaking to Stuff, Betty said that at the time lockdown was called, the country faced a stark choice.

‘‘We were either going to go left and follow Europe – and Italy in particular – and I thought we were literally one week away from that, or we [were going] down a track of lockdown, which actually halted the spread of the coronavirus in New Zealand.

‘‘You’ve got to remember that at that time we had exponential growth going on. [Our case numbers] were doubling every day. We looked to see what was happening overseas and you got to a point where there were cases and illnesses and sickness and the hospital systems basically got overwhelmed,’’ he said.

‘‘Looking at Italy, we had a very clear idea of what the future was starting to look like if you lost control of it and you allowed the exponential growth to go on.’’

To date, Italy has seen 234,013 cases of the virus, and 33,689 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. By comparison, New Zealand has had 22 Covid-19 fatalities and 1504 cases.

As New Zealand prepares for a likely move to alert level 1 next week, Betty told doctors in his letter that it would be ‘‘remiss at this point to rest on our laurels and think this is finished’’.

‘‘In some of the modelling I’ve seen, it would take just three to five patients with Covid-19 to continue their normal business for three days, undetected, to face a potentially exponential increase in cases again,’’ Betty wrote.

In the absence of community transmission he was confident the virus was controlled, but said the big challenge now was keeping control of the borders.

He said doctors needed to be prepared to step up again should a second wave emerge.

‘‘We are not finished, nor potentially will we be for the next 18 months,’’ Betty wrote.