New Zealand wasn't ready for this pandemic, having scored 54 points out of a possible 100 on an international preparedness assessment and running our response off the "wrong plan". Given this, why/how have we managed to weather the storm so far? #Covid19
newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/29/114…
newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/29/114…
What you need to know: No country was truly prepared for a pandemic, as the global situation shows. The Global Health Security Index (GHSI), released in October, was the first comprehensive international assessment of pandemic preparedness. Just 5 countries scored above 75/100.
Although New Zealand came 35th, it barely met half of the GHSI criteria. It was found particularly lacking in the ability to detect a local outbreak of an emergent pathogen, but also struggled in health capacity and emergency planning categories.
Although the GHSI coincidentally arrived just months before #Covid19, this pandemic wasn't a surprise. Epidemiologists have been warning for decades about the danger of a global pandemic from influenza, diseases transferred as a result of human encroachment on nature and biotech.
New Zealand's lack of preparedness can perhaps best be seen in the plan we chose to use to combat #Covid19. We've run our response off of the 2017 Influenza Pandemic Plan, which mentions SARS four times (including once in the glossary) and excludes other coronaviruses entirely.
New Zealand's last emergency plan that substantively deals with something like a coronavirus outbreak dates back to the 2004 National Health Emergency Plan: Infectious Diseases.
Why does it matter? Influenza has a shorter incubation period, rendering testing and contact tracing useless and a containment or elimination strategy all but impossible. Bureaucratic inertia kept the Govt chugging along the flu plan, even though it didn't fit the situation.
"We had a good plan for the wrong virus," Michael Baker told me. It took a concerted effort to get New Zealand to realise that we had a chance at elimination if we engaged in measures fit for a coronavirus instead of influenza.
Given all of this, why is New Zealand among the world leaders in dealing with #Covid19? Epidemiologist Nick Wilson has a theory: A country's outcome in a pandemic is determined by its preparedness, its response in the moment and no small amount of luck.
Our response, excluding the over-reliance on the influenza plan, has been top notch. We've also been lucky, getting our first case on February 28 instead of January 28, despite a relatively high amount of travel from China during the initial stages of the outbreak there.
In fact, our poor preparedness may have even helped us out. By mid-March, the Government had no illusions that we could tackle #Covid19 without significant efforts to ramp up testing and tracing. That forced us into a lockdown while other countries insisted they could handle it.
There's a lot more in there but these are the highlights. A word of warning: this is a long one, described internally at Newsroom as "Eloise Gibson level". @eloise_gibson your legacy lives on.
New from me: New Zealand's pandemic plan doesn't even raise the option of shutting the borders and other emergency guidelines downplay the efficacy of the measure, raising further questions about the country's pandemic preparedness. #COVID19 newsroom.co.nz/2020/05/04/115…
Here's what Ashley Bloomfield said when I asked him about NZ's pandemic planning - and whether it should cover more than just influenza: 
