Claudia Rees was thrown in at the deep end when she finished her Health Science degree, as a worldwide Pandemic hit New Zealand.
She shared her story and learnings with the Club this week,
John Bishop reports.
The contact tracing system played a vital role in battling the spread of covid 19,
Claudia Rees a team leader in the National Investigation and Training Centre,
told the club this week.
Claudia Rees a team leader in the National Investigation and Training Centre,
told the club this week.
Claudia has a Bachelor of Health Science in Population Health and joined the
Department of Health playing a small part in managing the measles epidemic
in 2019.
“In March 2020, the NITC was established, and I was seconded there for three
days and ended up staying three years,” she said.
In the early days of the pandemic, “the goal was elimination and contact
tracing was a key part of that strategy.”
NITC had to scale up quickly. At the start it could handle about ten cases a day
“which was obviously inadequate.”
The country’s twelve Public Health Units (run by DHBs) all had different
processes and different IT systems, so a standard national system to handle
large volumes had to be built from scratch.
“The border was a huge barrier but when covid did get in, we stamped it out,”
Claudia said.
But the system could not handle the Delta variant and the government made a
significant policy shift.
“We had to ask people to look after themselves,” she said. “Now there is a
threat of another pandemic but we have learned a lot about how to handle
that and have scoped a range of scenarios to help plan for what might
happen.”