Health
Sunday

Ashley Bloomfield: I suffered 'a kind of anxiety' during nationwide Covid-19 lockdown

The Director-General of Health says the only failure in the pandemic response is if we don’t learn from mistakes.

Gill Higgins talked with the Director-General of Health for a special Sunday programme about an extraordinary year dealing with the pandemic in New Zealand.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield was tasked with a job no other Director-General of Health in New Zealand has ever had to do.

“I asked myself the question, ‘Gosh this is a once in a 100-year pandemic, how come it had to happen during my five-year contract term?’.” 

I show him a recording of the first media conference he held about the coronavirus, before it even had a name.

It was January 27, 2020. He stood with Dr Caroline McElnay, Director of Public Health, in a small room. He laughs as he recalls he had to introduce himself as few journalists even knew his name.

He says for those first few weeks, the response to the barrage of questions was “we don’t know, we don’t have that information, but we will go and see if we can get it”.  

Very quickly, Covid-19 took over his life. “I do remember those first few weeks was a white-knuckle ride.”

He remembers hearing advice from the World Health Organisation to "choose your pathway, pursue it and don’t have any regrets". He says the team at the Ministry of Health chose to do all they could to keep the virus out of the country, and if it did arrive, then to stamp it out.

This was after seeing how an influenza pandemic plan, where the virus is managed in the community, was already failing.

“It became apparent, particularly in Europe, that actually you couldn’t manage it.”

The New Zealand approach was challenging and meant changes to society they could never have imagined in their wildest dreams. He says that even when the initial guidelines were drawn up “the idea of a community-wide lockdown wasn’t even in the plan”.

Similarly, closing the border to everyone except New Zealanders “was only a small line, because it wasn’t something we actually contemplated would happen”.  

It demonstrates how rapidly everything was changing. Once the lockdown had been decided on, and introduced, Bloomfield says “there was a sense of relief, and people said OK, we get it. No-one said 'why are we going into lockdown?'.”  

But at first, cases continued to rise. Day after day, Bloomfield was standing in front of media, facing questions and criticisms. 

“Because the enormity of what was unfolding was becoming apparent and the size of the decisions that needed to be made, those weeks were incredibly stressful.”   

He acknowledges the country’s response hasn’t been perfect but says “some people are very attracted to the word failure”. Looking back now, he sees how this was all taking a huge toll: “I was getting a kind of anxiety”. 

Remembering the first day he didn’t have a media stand up, he felt his body responding as if he did. “So, by 11 o’clock, my cortisol levels were going through the roof”.

He realised: “I need to step aside, have a little break”.

He says one event stands out as his lowest point of the year. “When two people travelled from Auckland to Wellington who subsequently tested positive.”

The two people had been allowed to leave quarantine to see a grieving parent. “That was a challenging time. But I had great belief in our ability to learn from that. And we did, and so I think that's been fundamental to our success since.”

He’s happy to say his most vivid recollections now aren’t the media stand-ups, or the tough decisions, but “sitting out in the sun and hearing nothing but birds”. 

And at the end of each day he could have dinner with his wife and family.

“So it was a time of great gifts,” he says.  

He’s also unashamedly proud of what the country has achieved. He beams at me and talks about the collective efforts of New Zealanders, almost as if he’s praising the efforts of his sons at school.

He adds that what was achieved was “beyond what we had anticipated”.

And when I mention how he became a national hero, our “Curve Crusher”, he’s having none of it.  

“I’m getting used to that, but we all actually crushed the curve with our collective kindness. And I think that’s a really nice way to think about it.” 

WATCH THE FULL STORY OF LIVING THROUGH LOCKDOWN ON SUNDAY TVNZ1 7.30PM

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