Dr Ayesha Verrall has had a role in improving New Zealand's contact tracing to contain Covid-19. Photo / Lewis Gardner
Dr Ayesha Verrall has had a role in improving New Zealand's contact tracing to contain Covid-19. Photo / Lewis Gardner
When Dr Ayesha Verrall heard about a new and very infectious disease originating in China she felt a "huge responsibility" to limit its spread.
Verrall is a specialist in infectious disease research, works at Wellington Hospital and lectures at Otago University. She is also a Labour Party list candidate andwas in Whanganui at the weekend to support the local campaign.
"I was extremely worried that our contact tracing capacity wasn't up to containing a fast-growing outbreak," Verrall told the Chronicle.
"Unless we fixed our system we were going to have this disaster that we could have avoided."
Her previous work had mainly been with tuberculosis, but the World Health Organisation report on the new disease in Wuhan showed it had some similarities. Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield asked Verrall to write a report on contact tracing - which she did in three days.
Contact tracing is the responsibility of public health units. Their size variesbetween regions, and the computer systems they use vary too.
The units could be easily overwhelmed, Verrall said. She suggested "joining the dots" by entering data into a computer system shared across New Zealand. That way, when a small public health unit like Whanganui's is overwhelmed, it can call in help from others.
Contact tracing has to be done on the ground in case welfare help is needed as well. But public health units from outside the district can contribute from a distance by telephone.
Contact tracing has improved a lot since March and her report, Verrall said. It's now capable of working on 1000 cases a day.
Its success is proved by the way cases in the large second-wave Auckland cluster tailed off with effective containment.
And early testing of cases is essential, Verrall said. Testing is better now too, with the capacity to test 4000 to 5000 people a day.
The right group of people have to be tested, and to achieve that health authorities need to maintain the trust of all the groups in their community.
"Health authorities need to be thinking 'Are there ethnic groups we are not reaching?'," Verrall said.
New Zealand's attempt to prevent people getting the disease is the right approach, she said, and it is not only older people who are vulnerable to it.
"People in their 40s and 50s can be in intensive care for a month with this. No one should feel that they're safe if they get Covid."
Our quarantine system is only as good as the people who provide it, Verrall said. And the fact that testing results in a few false negatives means there is always a chance an infectious person has been missed, even if they are tested many times.
She said New Zealand has also taken a sensible approach to accessing a vaccine, by joining other countries and investing in the Covax scheme.
"Being a member of that and pooling our resources with other countries means we all get a stake in any of the top 10 vaccines."
What is less certain is how long immunity from a vaccine will last, and how long immunity from having the disease lasts. Six people have had it twice - but one had no symptoms and it was only picked up on a swab.
People who have no or few symptoms seem to spread the disease less.
Whanganui's relative isolation is no protection from Covid-19, Verrall said. When the virus surfaced, stakeholders were told there would be 600 to 800 deaths in the region if it took hold.
