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Mahurangi epidemiologist Dr Jason Gurney says New Zealand will need to maintain tight border controls if it is to succeed in its goal of eliminating Covid-19.
At the same time, he has blasted the lax approach taken to the virus by Sweden.
Dr Gurney says with respect to international borders, this could mean in the first instance only opening up to visitors from Australia and only then if the country achieves elimination of Covid-19 itself.
“We all need to realise that the world has fundamentally changed for everyone, not just New Zealand, and that things aren’t going to return to anything resembling normality for a year or more,” he says.
Dr Gurney says meanwhile, ongoing contact tracing and surveillance are crucial to stamping out community transmission and flare ups of the virus, which New Zealand has by and large managed to achieve so far with its lockdown.
Dr Gurney poured scorn on the Swedish approach to Covid-19, which he says is “backfiring catastrophically” and anyone who suggests otherwise does not know what is truly happening.
In contrast to much of the rest of Europe, Sweden’s restaurants, bars, schools, offices and borders remain open, with people simply encouraged to keep their distance and act responsibly.
Dr Gurney says it’s an imperfect measure, but Sweden’s death rate is currently sitting at around 175 per million, compared to 25/million in Finland and 34/million in Norway – both countries which sit right next door to Sweden.
“And Sweden’s mortality rate is increasing exponentially. It was 120 deaths/million less than a week ago.”
Dr Gurney says if New Zealand had adopted the Swedish approach it would have resulted in New Zealand’s health system being utterly overwhelmed by cases of Covid-19.
“Countries that were overwhelmed – like Spain, Italy and even the United States – were eventually forced to go into lock-down anyway because their system was overrun,” he says.
“Instead, we took a preventative approach and will come out the other side of it in a much stronger position than most other countries.”
Dr Gurney adds that there is no evidence that the so-called “herd immunity” approach that Sweden is going for works with Covid-19.
A herd immunity approach seeks to isolate vulnerable people while allowing the disease to wash through the rest of society.
“Every country that has tried to do that has experienced completely unacceptable mortality outcomes – just look at the UK for another example of that.”
Dr Gurney says there is no question that New Zealand’s approach to Covid-19 has been a good one.
“I believe the current disquiet around our approach from a vocal minority is because it has worked even better than we could have hoped,” he says.
