Photo: Pool / Getty
Half a decade after New Zealand's first lockdown, a look at what went wrong, what went right, and how ready we are for the next pandemic.
Softer vaccine mandates, no harsh lockdowns - but our borders would be closed sooner.
Tha is one scenario for the next big pandemic if the government goes ahead with recommendations from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid 19 Lessons Learned.
"We would only use those mandatory measures if we really needed to next time, that's a lesson that we take out of the last pandemic," says inquiry chair Professor Tony Blakely.
"That means that we need to have better preparation for the next one. That means having investment in your public health workforce for example, to be able to do good contact tracing, to having ESR to be able to surge genomic testing. Have all those things ready to go."
But the government has ignored the commission's report until a second inquiry is completed next February and Blakely says a decision on the recommendations will not be made until late next year.
Newsroom senior political reporter Marc Daalder says we can not afford to wait.
"There are worrying signs. People are looking quite concernedly at H5N1, the bird flu, the avian influenza that's been spreading around the world since 2020, but particularly in the Americas where it has mutated to be able to spread between mammals.
"That's the first time it's ever happened with this particular strain of bird flu and on the few cases where you have had the virus jump from animals into humans in the past, about 800 times in various poultry farm outbreaks and wet markets, about half the people who have caught the virus have died."
He says preparations for the next pandemic could also be jeopardised by funding cuts to agencies such as ESR and specialist medical research.
"This is a long term process, you can't just create pandemic preparedness overnight, even with all the money in the world," he says.
"What it requires is that commitment to continuous improvement, continually evolving."
Five years after the country went into the first level four lockdown, Professor Blakely says the report from the Royal Commission shows the country handled the pandemic well and but mistakes were made.
"We [the inquiry team] took incredibly seriously the onus, the responsibility put on us under the Inquiries Act to be independent and impartial.
"We've said that New Zealand did very well and there's no escaping that.
"But the wheels did get wobbly and things like vaccine mandates, particularly in the workplace, went on too long and affected too many people adversely."
Blakely says the commission hopes that by being honest and impartial, it will "help the healing going forward".
Daalder, who read the 716-page report in full, says the country's readiness for another pandemic is mixed.
"There are many ways that we're worse off. You look at the health system and the backlogs there. Some of that coming out of Covid for sure but a lot of that's way worse than it was in 2020.
"On the other hand, we do have a national contact tracing IT system. Hopefully it will get the funding it needs to stay updated but if a pandemic were to happen tomorrow, we'd be able to scale that one up pretty quickly."
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