We are honoured to have had the Foreword to the Report written by Dame Juliet Gerrard, Chief Science Advisor to Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.
Dame Juliet was at the centre of the planning and development of the NZ response to Covid-19 which was widely regarded as one of the outstanding successes of the global response.
The report covers a period when the initial hope that the new year would bring relief from the lockdowns that had been imposed (and re-imposed) at the end of 2020 turned to despair when it was realised that new variants of Covid-19 were emerging, which would threaten once again the capacities and capabilities of response frameworks around the world.
As well as political tensions in the US and between US and China, there was a growing weariness with Covid-19 and all the restriction associated with that. And yet by the end of March, the report is able to summarise the situation as ‘there was the general feeling that the world was on its way out of the pandemic’. Once again, it was quite possible that those claiming to see the light at the end of the tunnel would be proven wrong by events that were beyond their control.
