A document sent to the Ministry of Health in May obtained by 1 NEWS seemingly predicted the second outbreak of Covid-19 with stunning detail
In the document, a public health expert suggested the contact tracing team create a simulation exercise involving a church-based community in South Auckland.
It comes along with questions as to why no formal 'testing' of the tracing system ever took place before a Mount Roskill church became the real-life focus of Auckland's Covid cluster in August.
Three months before the second outbreak, professor Philip Hill came up with a hypothetical model - a simulated 'stress test' to put the contact tracing service through its paces.
“I potentially thought it could be a drill, I thought this could be the stress test and they've gone for the big one,” Hill told 1 NEWS.
In his model he suggested a second outbreak would be based in South Auckland, focused on a highly-social community, such as a Pacific Island church and might have involved a second gathering to complicate matters.
All of which came to pass - a funeral gathering forming the bereavement sub-cluster.
Hill's scenario was sent to an individual in the Health Ministry back in May and it was later backed up by findings from another report, which recommended the contact tracers be tested with outbreak simulations.
Dr Collin Tukuitonga, Associate Dean Pacific at the University of Auckland, says he is surprised at how accurate Hill’s predictions were.
“I do think that we should have taken advantage of the intelligence and the proposal that Professor Hill had offered,” Tukuitonga said.
But the Health Ministry says it was just days away from testing but was beaten to the punch.
“We then sadly didn't need to do an artificial stress test because we had uckland,” the Ministry of Health's director of public health, Dr Caroline Mcelnay, said.
However Hill had only praise for the Ministry of Health.
“But you know you can’t complain about how things have gone, there are some real heroes in there, who've been doing long hours."
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