1. Now that the first case is here, what can we expect?
We have been lucky in having these five weeks of no cases, and the five weeks have been very useful in helping us to gear up our systems.
I've been warning about this for many weeks now, and let me continue the warning because this won't be the last case... Keep healthy, because at the end of the day, it's about your immune system.
There is no need for a sense of panic.
2. Should we get a vaccine to protect against H1N1?
We have a contract with an Australian vaccine manufacturer, a very large one, so it's up to us to decide when we want to start placing the order. These are the issues that we will be thinking through over the next few days or even the next few weeks as we get better information about this virus.
3. Can H1N1 be contained?
Nobody can contain H1N1. It is easily spread, therefore it is not containable but you can try to slow down the pace of spread, in a slow burn scenario. And it will burn slowly if we are alert, in detecting, isolating, contact tracing very aggressively, hunting down every possible close contact and quarantining them. At great inconvenience, of course to the people, but the objective really is to avoid a wildfire scenario, so that we can have a slow burn.
4. Should we stop travelling to affected areas?
The wildfire scenario that I just described obviously is the case in US, in Mexico, perhaps in Canada. And so, if you go there, the likelihood of you getting infected, I think, is very high. Fortunately the mortality rate is not so high, but even then, when you fall sick, and you may be inconvenienced, like when you come back, you and all your friends will be quarantined for several days, so is it worth it?
So if you really need to go, if for some reason you need to be at a meeting there, I suppose that cannot be avoided. But if you can avoid it, then my advice is do you really want to go? If you want to go away for a holiday, why don't you go somewhere else? So I think that's common sense.
5. Will the alert be raised from yellow to orange?
Our yellow alert takes into account scenarios like this, so there's no need to. We will only raise it if empirical evidence suggests that, let's say, next week the virus has mutated and is causing great havoc in the other countries, causing much higher fatality rate, then of course it's a different ball game and we will have to review our alert system.
