Australia’s Quarantine Systems Failures: Lessons for NZ

Wednesday, May 12th, 2021 | tedla55p | 1 Comment

Dr Leah Grout, Ameera Katar, Dr Jennifer Summers, Prof Nick Wilson (*Author details)

Aotearoa NZ and Australian states have successfully eliminated community transmission of COVID-19, albeit with occasional outbreaks from imported cases. Both countries have primarily used hotel-based quarantine for returning travellers, but still do not have optimal border control. In this blog we consider potential lessons from Australia’s 17 quarantine systems failures for NZ.

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Improving NZ Government Communication about COVID-19: Five Suggestions Including a Proposal for Depoliticisation

Monday, May 3rd, 2021 | tedla55p | 2 Comments

Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Jennifer Summers, Dr Leah Grout, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig

The high quality communication by the NZ Government for much of the COVID-19 pandemic has been remarked on. But given that the pandemic situation is very far from over, in this blog we consider five areas in which potential improvements could be made. Potentially the most important of these would be to further depoliticise the COVID-19 response.

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More Evidence that Elimination is the Best COVID-19 Control Strategy for Health and the Economy

Monday, April 12th, 2021 | carra86p | 1 Comment

Prof Nick Wilson, Dr Jennifer Summers, Prof Michael Baker

In this blog we briefly consider a new Report from a European think tank that aims to identify an optimal COVID-19 response strategy. It considers mortality data, GDP impacts, and mobility data and suggests that COVID-19 elimination appears to be superior to mitigation/suppression strategies in health and economic terms. Nevertheless, more data and a longer-term perspective is needed, before we can be really certain about the relative benefits and costs of different COVID-19 control strategies.

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Charting our way back to normal

Thursday, April 8th, 2021 | tedla55p | 3 Comments

By Professor Tony Blakely, Dr Tim Wilson, Luke Thorburn and Professor Nathan Grills, University of Melbourne

A new web tool, COVID-19 Pandemic Trade-offs, allows people to weigh the costs and benefits of different policy responses as Australia rolls out vaccines and considers opening borders.

See here for an associated explanatory video. Article reproduced with permission from Pursuit 

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To ensure success of the trans-Tasman travel “green zone”, we need to reduce system failures at the NZ border

Tuesday, March 30th, 2021 | carra86p | 2 Comments

Dr Leah Grout, Dr Jennifer Summers, Dr Amanda Kvalsvig, Prof Michael Baker, Prof Nick Wilson

While succeeding very well with its elimination strategy, NZ still does not have optimal border control. We find since July 2020 there have been 13 identified border failures and at least 6 internal MIQ facility failures. The forthcoming quarantine-free “green zone” between NZ and Australia provides an opportunity for NZ to benchmark its MIQ/border management policies and practices with Australian States and Territories to identify improvements in both countries.

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