Health Research Saves Lives!

Ka Whakarauoratia te Hunga e te Rangahau Hauora!

 

Covid 19

Open letter to all New Zealanders

Nip it, sweetie!

Our first open letter to New Zealanders (which can be read here) was titled “zip it, sweetie!”

We pushed the message that there should be a stop to negative opinions of non-experts which could undermine public confidence in the science which was informing the New Zealand government’s response to the Covid 19 pandemic.

The response from kiwis who saw the Facebook post was overwhelmingly positive, and we want to thank everybody who’s being doing their bit to help us get us through this crisis as soon as possible.

Our message now is “nip it, sweetie!”

We’ve run the figures from Ministry of Health web pages and produced the following graphs, which take us through to the end of Easter. They’re giving us good reason to be optimistic that with further concerted effort we can nip this thing in the bud.

The “prevalence” graph shows the number of active cases on any given day. This is the number who’ve become infected but haven’t yet recovered (or who sadly have died). If this number continues to trend down at the same rate that it has since its high point of 748 cases on April 5th, it will be close to zero by the end of April. If it stays that way we will all have nipped Covid 19 in the bud.

 

However, the two “ifs” are huge. Our message therefore to all kiwis is: Hang in there. Don’t be complacent. Trust the science. Don’t undermine the trust in science. Stay in our bubbles. Save lives.

Please show your support for this message by liking and sharing our Facebook post at https://www.facebook.com/NZ4HR

 

14^th April 2020

Chris Higgins
Chief Executive | New Zealanders for Health Research

+64 27 292 8433 mobile | [email protected]
www.nz4healthresearch.org.nz