Today's Epidemic Response Committee meeting discussed business, the economy and contact tracing.
Dr Ayesha Verrall Photo: supplied
Infectious diseases expert Dr Ayesha Verrall, Xero's founder Rod Drury, KPMG global head of agribusiness Ian Proudfoot, Agribusiness leader Traci Houpapa, researcher and writer Max Rashbrooke and NZ Initiative executive director and economist Oliver Hartwich all spoke at the meeting.
Dr Verrall spoke about the audit of contact tracing.
She said she hopes her report on the system is clear and constructive.
"This system has been the cornerstone of control of large clusters (overseas)."
The New Zealand system was not well-resourced enough when it swung into action, she said.
"I visited ... the service on 9 April and was impressed with what they achieved."
We need responses that can scale to surges in Covid-19, she said.
"I recommended that we needed to expand the capacity of public health units by three- or four-fold to cope with Covid-19."
We still need to plan from an outbreak of the virus, she said, despite our plans to eliminate.
"Contact tracing could allow us to control that outbreak."
She recommended a contact tracing system capable of tracing 1000 people per day.
She said a health system's effectiveness could only be assured when it was measured.
"We need to have end-to-end view of the (contact tracing) process."
Dr Verrall said when new systems (like the upgraded contact tracing system) were set up, performance was slow and needed work.
She said of the many untraced contacts, she had heard many were from early in the outbreak, and would no longer be an issue.
She said it would be "great" to get frequently updated figures on traced contacts.
Dr Verrall said since her report, contact tracing capacity had been increased above 100 percent.
Dr Verrall told the ERC, when asked about her recommended surge tracing capacity, her primary point was that we needed an outbreak plan.
"Exactly what sort of scenarios we put in place ... the point is whether you contact trace yourself out of those situations or use other measures."
Dr Verrall was asked how the contact tracing plan could prepare for surge capacity given people could not be sitting around waiting for a pandemic.
She said a limit of cases needed to be set at which an increase workforce from other places would be called in to scale up.
Dr Verall said New Zealand is at a very low numbers (cases) environment so she can't imagine the Ministry of Health will struggle with contact tracing during level 3.
She said the average interval between cases is 5-6 days so doesn't see an issue with the length of time of the level three lockdown time (two weeks).
Dr Verrall says was first in contact with the government's technical advisory group (colleagues of hers) and emailed the Ministry of Health between the 1st-7th of March outlining her concerns around contact tracing.
Dr Verall said the chance of something happening (catching Covid-19) in your community now is very low with numbers in the single digits.
