According to Helen Petousis Harris, associated professor at the University of Auckland, the key for New Zealand was a very decisive approach, expressing her hope the planet will be better prepared for the next pandemic.
Speaking to SBS Greek, Professor Petousis Harris, who has been working in the field of vaccine safety and effectiveness for 22 years, stressed that her country imposed quarantine before the number of cases increased significantly.
“We made a move very early when we only had a few cases to go out quite hard and quite quickly, so we locked down the country very early, before cases rose. Both countries had taken very similar actions, New Zealand was very early on. Australia was probably in a better position, probably had a better ability to test and better ability to trace the virus. At the time, New Zealand couldn’t do well on those things. Our move to lock down quite early it was something that has a very decisive approach, with very clear communication, has helped us”, she said.
Referring the days ahead, Helen Petousis Harris said that the next steps should be very careful.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern Source: Getty Images
“We made a move very early when we only had a few cases to go out quite hard and quite quickly, so we locked out the country the country very early, before many cases risen. Both countries had taken very similar actions. New Zealand it was very early, but at the beginning, when we enter into this, Australia was probably in a better position. I think they probably had better ability to test and better ability to trace. At the time, New Zealand couldn’t do either of these things well. Our move was to lock down quite early it was something that has a very decisive approach, with very clear communication, has helped us”, she said.
Professor Petousis Harris also spoke about the possibility of a second wave of infections, which she described as possible.
“We have to be very careful that we proceed with caution and we keep up as much testing as we can and also able to contact trace, because is possible new cases to arrive, they can be bought in from overseas still of course even if only a few people are coming, they can still come back in. So that’s going to be difficult. Also and I am sure Australia must be facing this too how we join the rest of the world, when we have control of COVID-19. It's always a possibility and I think that's what you have to be prepared for when you get to this point, prepared to manage the possibility of a second wave and to avoid that occurring to not let your guard down, which I think some countries had, they relaxed and they have been taking perhaps a little by surprised. It’s guaranteed, we take pandemics right through our history. This is not the first time we see a bat coronavirus emerged for example we had SARS we had MERS and now we have this one, and scientist have been warning for a long time this coronavirus is a pandemic thread. We had a pandemic in 2009-2010 from swine flu when the flu jumps from pigs into humans from which is happens periodically. It will happen again, I hope next time we will be better prepared”.
Adding about the efforts of global science community to prepare a vaccine on COVID-19.
We have a lot of knowledge about how to approach this and we approached it very carefully. We don't take an untested vaccine and throw it into the population. We don't skip any steps on these vaccines that we are testing, we must go through all the processes and then when we have something that looks like it's going to be effective and safe, we still need to keep assessing in our population as we roll it out to more and more people to be very sure that what we have is safe. It's been done before, New Zealand did it some years ago, we had a vaccine that it had only been tested on a few thousand people. There ways that you can start getting it out to your population because you can monitor in real time as you go very carefully until you built up lots of information and can be confident that you can deploy it widely.
