“New Zealand is probably one of the best places to be during this COVID19 pandemic”, that’s according to the University of Otago infectious diseases doctor and epidemiologist, Dr Ayesha Verrall.

Dr Verrall is a former dux of Fiordland College and former Otago University Student Association president. After graduating from the university’s medical school in 2004, she worked in Wellington Hospital where she completed specialist training in infectious diseases, including two months in Peru studying tropical medicine, and 18 months in Singapore.

In 2013 she received a Clinical Research Training Fellowship, awarded by the Health Research Council, to study Innate Immune Response to Tuberculosis.

Speaking from the University’s campus in Wellington, where she is now based, Dr Verrall said that while New Zealand did not have the health system such as China, Taiwan, South Korea or Singapore, where the virus had been contained due to very structured active public health surveillance and contact tracking, here the early lockdown measures had put us in a very good position to be able to contain and eliminate the virus.

Dr Verrall said countries that had been most effective in containing the virus had learned valuable public health lessons from the previous SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) outbreak in 2003 and were well prepared.

Right now, in New Zealand we have a passive surveillance and tracking system where only people with case definition symptoms are tested and isolated and their near contacts tracked and isolated.

While this works to a limited extent, Dr Verrall said we needed an active surveillance and contact tracking regime where we could test potentially up to a thousand people a day before the stringent lockdown measures could be loosened.

As part of a structured active surveillance the MOH (Ministry of Health) has asked that as many people as possible to sign up to their Flu Tracking survey.

This is a simple voluntary online survey that takes less than ten seconds each week during flu season. According the the MOH website, the main aims of FluTracking are to develop a system that can provide: 

• Community level influenza-like illness surveillance.

• Consistent surveillance of influenza activity across all jurisdictions and over time.

• Year-to-year comparison of the timing, attack rates, and seriousness of influenza in the community. 

To join the survey, CLICK HERE 

The most recent numbers of people infected with the virus show a significant proportion per head of population in the Southern Health District. 

“I suppose people would expect places like Auckland and other larger centres to have more outbreaks,” Dr Verrall said. “But it’s not a surprise that the spread is across the country given the mobile nature of New Zealand’s population and the number of overseas visitors up until the border closure”.

She also referred to the latest figures from MOH which show 56% of infections have been directly related to overseas travel while just 2% are from known community transfer.

Looking into the future, Dr Verrall said it was very possible to contain and even eliminate COVID19 in New Zealand with active surveillance, but she agreed with the Prime Minister’s statement that we could be looking to beyond a year of disruption – mainly because of continuing outbreaks around the world.

She said people could be reassured that although overseas travel may be limited in the future due to ongoing outbreaks, activities like online business and shopping would not pose any significant contagious risk as people could only catch this through their hands and face and that meticulous hand washing was the best deterrent.

Dr Verrall regularly answers questions live about COVID19 on the University of Otago Facebook page. If you want to listen CLICK HERE.