Covid-19: Spread The Word

The epidemic of novel coronavirus (Covid-19) has confronted the world with a new public health challenge on a global scale. Professor Kerryn Phelps explains why it is a familiar story of mobilising responses to an infectious disease with no known cure.

- Professor Kerryn Phelps

When I was a child I heard stories of a family member who had been sent away from family and school to a sanatorium, where he was confined until he recovered from tuberculosis (TB). These were the days before effective antibiotics, and TB was greatly feared. Like coronavirus, you either survived it or you didn’t, but you had to be isolated until you were no longer contagious. And in the 1940s there was a public anti-spitting campaign in New Zealand in an attempt to reduce transmission of tuberculosis in urban centres.

The world should have been better prepared for an epidemic like this. After all, there is an epidemic of influenza every year. And every year people die from the flu. It’s estimated that between 10 and 20 per cent of New Zealand’s population get the flu every year and about 750 people are admitted to hospital because of the illness.

Perhaps we are lulled into a false sense of security because it is so common that we just accept that there is a “cold and flu season”, or because there is a vaccine for the flu each year, or that if we get sick the health system will have the ability to get us better. The 2019-2020 flu season in the northern hemisphere is on track to be one of the worst in years.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States has estimated that between October 1, 2019 and February 29, 2020, there were: