448 - New Zealand's World Class COVID Response
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 28 March 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist, was a guest on the podcast in the early days of the pandemic to talk about her work with autopsies and COVID-19 in San Francisco. Since then, Dr. Melinek and her family moved to ... New Zealand, a nation that kept COVID from entering for many months. Dr. Melinek talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the latest COVID news from New Zealand, which includes high vaccination rates and a surge in omicron infections. They also talk about the role of a medical examiner in a country with few deaths related to COVID.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.5 | Today we head to New Zealand. I interviewed Dr. Judy Melanick, a forensic pathologist in Wellington. |
| 0:49.7 | Dr. Melanick left San Francisco early in the pandemic to take a job in a land without COVID. Now New |
| 0:56.6 | Zealand is experiencing a surge in Amicron cases. Let's listen. Dr. Judy Melanick, it's so great |
| 1:05.1 | to have you back on public health on call. It's been a while, hasn't it? It has. It's been |
| 1:09.7 | almost two years, actually, since you first |
| 1:12.0 | interviewed me, which was at the start of the pandemic. Right. Now, back then, you were in San Francisco |
| 1:16.4 | working as a medical examiner, but then you moved. I moved to New Zealand with my husband, |
| 1:23.2 | TJ, and two of our four children. And that was in July of 2020. So it was at the point where we were at the first peat in the San Francisco Bay Area. But New Zealand had come out of its lockdown and had had zero community cases for several weeks. |
| 1:44.0 | And you moved to be a medical examiner in New Zealand, is that right? had had zero community cases for several weeks. |
| 1:47.8 | And you moved to be a medical examiner in New Zealand, is that right? |
| 1:52.2 | Correct, except they don't call it a medical examiner here because they have a coronial system. So I am a forensic pathologist working for the coronial system through the Ministry of Justice. |
| 1:59.3 | And so what was it like to enter a country that had no cases? |
| 2:02.6 | I'm imagining they didn't just take you right from the plane to your apartment. |
| 2:06.6 | It was exactly as I expected, but it was surreal to come out of lockdown. |
| 2:12.6 | So what happened was at the time they had a 14-day managed isolation period where myself and my husband and two daughters, |
| 2:21.6 | we were in a hotel room, and we could not leave the hotel room except for very regimented periods |
| 2:28.8 | of exercises that we got certain times of day. But otherwise, we were pretty much in this hotel room for two |
... |
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