Coronavirus: Government not using all the tools in the fight against Covid-19, says former chief scientist

Thursday, 20 August 2020

Sir Peter Gluckman says New Zealand will have to move towards a more “weightless” economy.

Former government chief scientist Sir Peter Gluckman says more effective contact tracing and community surveillance would reduce the economic damage from future outbreaks of Covid-19.

Gluckman, director of the University of Auckland’s Centre for Informed Futures, said New Zealand was not using all the tools available to fight the disease.

The criticism came in a speech delivered today at the ANZ-KangaNews New Zealand Capital Markets Forum on Thursday, after National unveiled its policy for compulsory Covid-19 tests for travellers before they arrived in New Zealand, and the Government announced trials of the “CovidCard” contact tracing system.

“The more effective and efficient that testing, contact tracing and community surveillance are, the less likely severe constraints will be needed,” said Gluckman.

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“Other economies, such as Taiwan, are showing that, provided there is high community surveillance, rapid contact tracing, public compliance and determined mask use, clusters can be managed at lower levels of constraint,” he said.

“But we are not using all the tools that are available and it is not clear we have used optimally the four months since our viral awareness rose.”

“Even experts outside the inner group are unclear as to progress on option evaluation. More transparency would be desirable,” Gluckman said.

Public appetite for lockdowns would reduce with each new outbreak of disease, he predicted.

“In each case the decision on how to handle them will be hard and become harder,” he said.

“Our psychological resilience, our mental health and our businesses will not tolerate yo-yoing in and out of lockdown. Indeed, many will have been sensitised by the first lockdown and the stress effects of a second or third lockdown for them will likely be more severe and long-lasting.”

Australia is battling Covid-19, but Sir Peter Gluckman says it is now possible it will fail.

He also warned the cumulative impact on many businesses would be “real”.

Gluckman said “complacency” was likely to have played a part in Covid-19 penetrating the country’s defences, and he predicted the current QR code voluntary contact tracing system would diminish in effectiveness as the weeks passed.

“More rapid testing technologies exist,” he said. “Contact tracing by QR code requires active rather than passive compliance. This is in contrast to say the CovidCard as a passive recorder which could have enormous added value over time if well adopted.

National Party leader Judith Collins says Covid-19 and future threats will change the face of travel and announces a plan for a new border agency.

“Compliance with the QR code will inevitably fall over time because of complacency – other countries are moving towards developing policies and infrastructure for passive tracing which will likely be essential if we are to have zero tolerance to community spread.”

New Zealand could also learn from other countries about how to better secure its borders, Gluckman said.

“What can we learn from alternate approaches in other countries that are doing relatively well in managing the virus? Pre-arrival testing and on-arrival rapid testing, automatically monitored self-isolation, risk assessment and triage on arrival are all solutions being used in such countries,” he said.

“At what point will New Zealand have to think about such alternate or supplementary approaches? If Australia fails in its declared elimination strategy, which is now more than a remote possibility, what are the implications for us?”

Gluckman said Covid-19 New Zealand needed to refresh its broad economic strategy to focus on the “weightless” economy and the potential of the food sector, as the impact of Covid-19 on our economy hit home.

He said New Zealand’s highest income sectors – tourism, export education and agriculture – were threatened by long-term challenges, and it was unrealistic to return to a pre-Covid “business as usual” mindset.

He called for a renewed discussion on New Zealand’s longer-term strategy, with actions and policies that would support long-term economic growth and social development, in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals.

“Our most important asset will be knowledge and the weightless economy,” Gluckman said.

“Yet building this asset will require new strategies and much more than the rather limited efforts made by successive governments,” he said.

Many of our businesses were already pushing the frontiers of new ideas and processes in the IT, medical, agritech and manufacturing sectors, he said.

But, he said: “We are yet to reach a critical mass of labour and capital that catalyses further entrepreneurship and creates capacity to market globally and earn at scale.”

He said multinational corporations account for the vast majority of private research and development around the world and are core to global innovation systems, yet New Zealand had the lowest density of these in the OECD.