New Zealand has not yet obtained the tests available to check for the new deadly virus spreading from China.
Last year almost 51,000 tourists from China came to New Zealand in the month of the Chinese New Year, which coincides this weekend. But so far there are no plans to screen passengers arriving from China.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) will on Wednesday night be considering whether to declare an international public health emergency over the virus - as it did with swine flu and Ebola. Such a declaration, if made, will be seen as an urgent call for a coordinated international response.
New Zealand's director of public health Dr Caroline McElnay told Morning Report they were in talks with ESR (Institute of Environmental Science and Research) and labs to get the test up and running in New Zealand, but was unsure when that would happen.
"Australia has now been able to get that test up and running there, so at the moment we would have to send samples to Australia."
New Zealand has followed a similar route to Australia by increasing the visibility of information via health advice cards, Dr McElnay said.
"We don't have any direct flights in from Wuhan, it's likely that some people could come in to New Zealand [from Wuhan] via Australia.
"We're certainly not complacent about this, we have assessed that our risk is low and we're certainly prepared to do what we need to do to ensure this virus doesn't spread."
Dr McElnay said there was also a policy in place that required airlines to contact public health units before landing if someone onboard was sick.
She said they were in close contact with WHO and keen to see the result of tonight's meeting, with hopes for more specific information on the virus.
Professor Michael Baker, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Otago, told Morning Report that this was a Sars-type scenario.
"I think we should be very worried ... the whole world is in the same situation in that we are short of information and that's typical of what happens in early days of an outbreak that looks like it could become a pandemic, in fact technically it's close to being a pandemic now.
"We're at the watching phase. But given the history of Sars and the behaviour of the virus so far, I think we should all be getting geared up for having to respond in the same way we did with Sars."
Prof Baker said even working on a vaccine for the disease would take months, but there were some positive learnings from the Sars pandemic.
"Fortunately, the Sars coronavirus responded very well to basic public health measures that's identifying cases, isolating them, contact-tracing, quarantine contacts, and that actually did stop it. It took several months to end that pandemic, but it was possible.
"As with almost all respiratory diseases, it's older people with pre-existing illness who are far more vulnerable to this infection."
Screening of passengers and infected people overseas
In a national advisory to health professionals earlier this month, the Ministry of Health said it was also monitoring the situation but not recommending any specific measures for travellers beyond the regular advice given to people arriving in the country - urging them to seek medical advice if they get sick within a month of their arrival.
A man in Australia who had travelled to Wuhan had been placed in isolation and underwent tests, but is no longer in quarantine. China is the largest source of tourists to Australia, with more than one million people visiting last year.
A handful of cases have also been identified abroad: two in Thailand, one in Japan, one in South Korea and one in Taiwan. Those infected had recently returned from Wuhan. A US spokesperson on Wednesday said one traveller had been diagnosed in Seattle.
Prof Baker said the exponential rise of cases in China would suggest it would spill over into places where Chinese people travelled.
However, he said thermal screening was ineffective, as shown in research, and not recommended since it could not pin down the potential type of illness a traveller had.
Current measures at the border are risk-based screening assessments that increase chances of detecting passengers who arrive ill or may have been in contact with infected people, he said.
Prof Baker said there was also good provision in national pandemic planning documents to ensure that travellers to pacific nations from New Zealand were not infected.
"I think we have a huge responsibility to not export this disease to the Pacific."
