COMMENT:
Public health is not about public hospitals but about the health of whole populations and the main measure of success in public health is invisible because nothing happens. Public health doctors and epidemiologists (the public health scientists) don't cure cancer, they prevent it from happening in the first place. They don't undertake heroic operations to save the lives of our families and friends injured in car crashes, they prevent the crashes from happening. They don't save the lives of Covid-19 patients in the intensive care units of our public hospitals, they prevent the spread of infection.
The signs of our greatest successes are invisible to most people. My own field is the epidemiology of heart disease. Did you know that heart disease deaths have fallen by 90 per cent in New Zealand since 1967? Most New Zealanders, including a surprising number of my clinical colleagues, have no idea of this extraordinary but invisible achievement, much of it due to public health interventions around diet and smoking. We don't register it because we can't see an event that doesn't happen.
Now, as New Zealand is emerging from the greatest threat to life since World War II, some members of the public, some from the business community, political lobbyists, radio talk-show hosts and some politicians, are turning on the Prime Minister and her public health and epidemiology advisers, whose actions have saved thousands of lives. In the United Kingdom, hundreds of people are still dying every day because their political leaders did too little, too late and who are now appropriately too scared to end their belated lockdown. In the United States, the denigration of science and public health has led to a disaster that is still gaining momentum. The self-taught armchair epidemiologists, who so confidently yet naively, criticise New Zealand's response, have evidently blocked out the war-zone scenes in Italian and American hospitals and do not understand why you cannot compare New Zealand's situation to Australia's.