16 June 2025
An excerpt from Shaun Hendy’s new book, The Covid Response – A Scientist’s Account of New Zealand’s Pandemic and What Comes Next.
Just after 1.48 p.m. on Monday 23 March 2020, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that, following the recently introduced four-level alert system, New Zealand would move to Alert Level 3 (‘Restrict’) and then Alert Level 4 (‘Eliminate’) in the next forty-eight hours. Schools and most businesses would close, and travel would become severely restricted. Ardern had introduced the system just a few days earlier and already calls for her to make use of it had been growing. For some people her call came too late. For others it was a grave mistake. It was unprecedented. It was surreal.
I watched the announcement live, but when I think of that day I relive a moment from earlier in the morning. Just after 8 a.m. I was alone, sitting in my car in the driveway, in a cold sweat. My wife was still inside, gathering her coat and bag, on her way out to join me. I was now working from home, but she was still required to go to her office in Auckland’s CBD. I’d offered to drive her so she could avoid her normal commute on a crowded bus.
I was still sweating from a live interview with John Campbell from Television New Zealand (TVNZ). It was the first time I had appeared on TV via a video-call. During the interview I sat at my computer, newly set up on our dining table, and tried hard to keep my eyes on the bright green LED that marked the location of the webcam.
Just a fortnight ago, I had pulled together a team of scientists from around the country to model the spread of a new coronavirus. As a physicist it was not something I had imagined ever having to do, but I had worked with the government on animal diseases before and had found myself fielding requests from officials as the coronavirus got closer. Now I was in demand from the media.
I had plenty of experience with live TV, but I’d never given an interview like this before. Excerpts from it still play in my head today. I told Campbell that it was likely several thousand New Zealanders would die as a result of the novel coronavirus. If we did nothing, I said, the number of fatalities might be in the tens of thousands. Sharing these possibilities with Campbell’s audience was one of the most terrifying five minutes of my life.
Sitting on my own in the car, I thumped the steering wheel as I questioned what I had said. Did I get the emphasis right? Should I have been more optimistic?
Some scientists, like seismologists and volcanologists, prepare for such a moment for decades, studying the best ways to communicate in an emergency by reading academic articles, reviewing how their predecessors performed in the last disaster. The challenge is similar to communicating about a severe weather forecast. If you focus on the best-case scenario, people won’t take it seriously, but if you overemphasise the worst case, some may overreact. As a physicist, I had more experience in debunking claims about mobile phones causing cancer than grappling with how to deliver the kind of bad news that pandemics create. I was shaken.
I took a deep breath to clear my mind, picturing the route I would take from Grey Lynn to the CBD. My wife joined me in the car, and I backed slowly out of our driveway, my eyes on the rear-view mirror. It was a relief to be able to focus on driving.
I could hear an edge in my voice, though, as we talked about what might happen later that day. ‘The Prime Minister is likely to send everyone home today,’ I said. I offered to drive into town again to pick her up after the announcement, along with anything she needed from the office to work from home for a few months. ‘There could be a rush, so I’ll try to leave home early, maybe even before the press conference is over,’ I told her.
Traffic into the city wasn’t bad, halving what would normally have been an hour-long round trip. Perhaps people were avoiding the CBD. Just that morning, New Zealanders had woken to the news that the death toll from the new coronavirus had risen to 281 in the United Kingdom, while epidemiologist Sir David Skegg had told Radio New Zealand that we were just eight days behind. Mike Hosking, Newstalk ZB’s popular breakfast host, told his listeners: ‘You add cases by ones, then handfuls, then you add them by [tens], then you add them by hundreds.’
I ate lunch in what had been my kitchen but was now my office, listening to Dr Ashley Bloomfield on the radio. New Zealand had thirty-six new cases that day, bringing the total number of confirmed cases on our shores to 102. At around 1.30 p.m. I switched on the TV for the post-Cabinet press conference. A few minutes later, Prime Minister Ardern stepped up to a lectern in the Beehive.
Fifteen minutes into the press conference, Ardern told New Zealand that we would move to Alert Level 3 immediately and then Alert Level 4 at the end of the day, on Wednesday 22 March, for four weeks. Just a few weeks earlier such a decision would have been unthinkable, to me and to many other people, but as I watched Ardern lay out her plan, it now seemed an inevitability. What other choice did we have?
Two days later, my colleagues and I met by Zoom at 9.30 a.m. to discuss work priorities for the day, talk about any problems we were encountering, and set up any other meetings we would need later in the day. This routine would anchor my work life for the next two years. During this early period, in late March and early April, we stuck to it seven days a week.
At 12.21 p.m. that afternoon, a National State of Emergency was declared. The State of Emergency gave officials extra powers, allowing the government to mount a quick response to developing events. This was initially intended to last until 12.21 p.m. on 25 April, but it was extended six times, finally coming to an end on 13 May. It would be the longest state of emergency in New Zealand since the Canterbury earthquakes in 2011.
Then at 11.59 p.m., New Zealand moved to Alert Level 4: Eliminate.
The Covid Response (BWB, $39.99) is available now from all good bookstores.