Complexity to clarity

An interview with Shaun Hendy and a review of his new book The Covid Response (11 minute read)

Five years ago, New Zealanders had just been through two very tough months. We’d had nearly five weeks under some of the world’s strictest COVID-19 restrictions. Our border was closed to all but a few, who had to endure two weeks in managed isolation. Overseas, the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths kept rising at a frightening rate. It’s a time that few remember fondly, even if many people found creative ways to make the best of their circumstances.

But we were heading into the winter months in a better situation than many countries. Our efforts had taken us much further than just reducing COVID-19 cases to a manageable level. We had eliminated the virus. We could return to workplaces, schools, shops, bars, restaurants, cinemas, libraries, gyms and other shared spaces with a confidence envied by most of the world.

Most of us have some idea of how New Zealand achieved this feat. We watched the daily briefings, anxiously awaiting the latest case numbers and alert level updates. We stayed in our bubbles and we became familiar with concepts like R_o and flattening the curve. We heard the messages about the team of five million and understood we all had to do our bit.

What wasn’t apparent, though, is that the work of a handful of scientists was at the heart of our country’s success. All New Zealand’s planning had been for an influenza pandemic, something we had seen before. COVID-19 was new. The science was changing daily.

Few people understood better than Shaun Hendy what would be needed. When he established Te Pūnaha Matatini, the Centre of Research Excellence for complex systems, infectious disease was on his priority list for research projects. While funding constraints meant the project didn’t happen, he knew that he and his team could do the work if needed.

In March of 2020, it was. From the scientists affiliated with Te Pūnaha Matatini, he brought together – virtually – a team to work with the numbers. Together, they would develop mathematical models which would enable the government, and the public, to make informed decisions about managing the risks of COVID-19.

Hendy has now written an account of that work which is accessible to non-mathematicians and non-scientists. His book, The Covid Response: a scientist’s account of New Zealand’s pandemic and what comes next¹, takes us from the early reports of a new disease in Wuhan to the spread of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 throughout New Zealand. He looks at what we knew before, such as the lessons learned from the 2003 outbreak of the SARS virus, a relative of COVID-19. He also considers what we might face in the future, and what we need in order to be ready.

Thanks to Bridget Williams Books for giving me a copy to review.

I spoke with Hendy to learn more about how he came to be at the centre of New Zealand’s COVID-19 response, and about the work which helped us avoid the worst of the pandemic. I learned that, at first glance, he might seem an unlikely person to be working on infectious disease models. He originally set out to be a physicist and went to Canada to do his PhD on black holes. But he didn’t think that would get him a job in New Zealand, so on his return he began working for Industrial Research Ltd, the Crown Research Institute which would later become Callaghan Innovation. Over time, though, he told me, he moved towards a university role.

“It's partly a function of how unstable the funding was in the Crown Research Institutes. The 2000s were a quite uncertain period, although it's always been that way with Crown Research Institutes. But it resulted in me being drawn towards the MacDiarmid Institute², which was something that Paul Callaghan had set up. He was an amazing lecturer, and amazing person, and very inspiring as a physicist. I moved towards modelling to support nanotechnology and material science for the Institute. That was great, it really grabbed me.”

While Hendy enjoyed the work, telling me he had a lot of fun, he says that he broadened his domain as Paul Callaghan got him interested in how science drives the economy. “I think that this was partly because of my frustration that the New Zealand government wasn't investing enough in science and technology. It appeared to want to grow the economy, but it didn't want to do the basic, hard work of producing the science and knowledge that ultimately leads to innovation. So then I became interested in where new ideas came from.

“That led me to studying networks, which from a physicist's point of view are the mathematical objects that describe relationships between large numbers of things. I was looking at networks of people communicating with one another, sharing ideas and coming up with new inventions. That became a really productive area for me. I was working with economists, working with ecologists, and I thought we should be doing more of this type of stuff. Why isn't there more of this kind of cross-fertilization going on?”

It was this experience which led him to start Te Pūnaha Matatini, which he describes as “an attempt to create a new type of research organization. It wasn't focused on one particular problem. It brought people together to spark new ways of thinking about problems.”

At the start of 2020, Te Pūnaha Matatini had already advised the government on infectious disease modelling, but it wasn’t for human disease. They had been supporting New Zealand’s response to a cattle disease usually referred to as M.bovis³. “We started working with some of the data sets for that response, and using them to reconstruct how diseases spread. If one animal has come into contact with an infected animal, where does that animal then go? You’re developing little bits of mathematics to represent that process.”

However, it’s clear from both our conversation and from his book that it wasn’t experience with infectious disease modelling which made Te Pūnaha Matatini scientists so crucial to New Zealand’s response. Their diverse expertise was part of it, because one person might notice what another didn’t see. But it was also their ability to communicate. Prior to 2020, three winners of the Prime Minister’s Science Communication Prize, including Hendy himself, were part of Te Pūnaha Matatini⁴. When evidence is needed to make urgent decisions, it’s no use if decision-makers can’t understand what the evidence tells them.

Hendy brings his ability to communicate complex information clearly to The Covid Response. In the opening chapter, he describes the countdown to New Zealand entering Alert Level Four at 11.59pm on the 25^th of March 2020. As well as covering the key events, he gives an account of the uncertainties. Was the virus being transmitted person-to-person? If it was, how fast would it spread? How many people would become infected? How dangerous was it – what proportion of people would die? He explains what was known, and when, and gives insights into why these questions aren’t easy to answer.

As the book progresses, it covers the key events in the pandemic, and particularly New Zealand’s response. Although he wasn’t part of the decision-making itself, Hendy and his team were running models and providing reports on which many of these decisions hinged. It means he is one of few people who are not only able to explain what happened, but also why. An example of this was the government’s refusal to set a vaccination target, the figure at which restrictions could be lifted. Some countries, notably Australia, set a target. The media and opposition politicians called for New Zealand to do so. Hendy writes about the drawbacks of a specific target, in particular the point that it isn’t simply the total proportion of people who are vaccinated which matters. It also matters who is vaccinated, and who is not, particularly if vulnerable groups have missed out.

The Covid Response also traces the evolution of the science, from the publication of the virus’s genetic code in January of 2020, to the different kinds of mathematical models used to estimate potential spread and impacts, both in New Zealand and overseas. It covers the development of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine used in New Zealand, as well as vaccination strategies. Here, the breadth of Hendy’s skill in making science sound simple shows itself. By weaving this information with history and personal memoir, he turns what could have felt dry and dense into a narrative which is clear and compelling.

Hendy doesn’t avoid expressing his own opinions on the decisions made, whether he agreed or disagreed with them. This may be perceived as a lack of objectivity, but in reality nobody is objective. It’s the methodology of science and the collective effort to validate or disprove scientific findings which provides objectivity, not the individual scientists. However, it is important for scientists to be aware of when they are explaining evidence and when they are offering opinions which are grounded in their own values. It’s clear from his writing that Hendy understands this.

I ask him how he avoids going too far into giving an opinion rather than stating the science. He tells me: “The media want you to and I don't think you can avoid it. But you've got to talk about the consequences of particular outcomes. You also have to bring ethics into it as well. One of the things I found difficult was around Māori vaccination. The science strongly suggested that Māori should be prioritised in the vaccine rollout, but that didn't happen. I had to be critical of the government, and some people might have seen that as crossing a line. But I was talking about what the consequences would be. I think that giving your opinion is not something you can avoid, but you've got to do it with nuance and care.”

Nuance and care is an apt description for how Hendy approaches the most difficult part of his story, the harrassment and escalating threats directed at him and his team. He doesn’t avoid the reality of receiving regular angry emails or being confronted by a conspiracy theorist who’d threatened to target scientists as they had less security than politicians. He notes the disparity between what was directed at him and what was directed at the female members of his team, particularly Siouxsie Wiles, as well as the lack of support from their employer, the University of Auckland. However, he doesn’t dwell on this aspect of his work. As always, his account is measured and evidence-based. Te Pūnaha Matatini researchers were studying the mis- and disinformation associated with the pandemic, so they understood what was being said and who was saying it. He also draws on the findings of the employment court, which ruled that the university’s response to the harrassment and threats was ‘problematic’ and ‘deficient’.

Not everybody will be ready to read The Covid Response. It’s unlikely to win over someone who is still convinced that COVID-19 was a hoax and that vaccines were a conspiracy to control people. For others, the events may be too raw. Even though New Zealand suffered less than many other countries, there are still people whose loved ones died surrounded by strangers wearing masks and face shields. There are those for whom lockdown was too traumatic to revisit right now.

Nonetheless, for most readers who had a difficult experience of the pandemic, The Covid Response is likely to be more validating than upsetting. While centred on the science which informed New Zealand’s response, it’s not detached from the suffering people experienced during the pandemic, either as a result of the virus or of the measures taken against the virus. Hendy writes with empathy and compassion, something which separates the best science communicators from those who are simply good at explaining information.

For those who’d rather forget the pandemic years, this book is a reminder of why we shouldn’t. COVID-19 might have been an exceptional event, but won’t be the last pandemic we face. We can’t afford to ignore the hard-won lessons of COVID-19. Hendy devotes his final chapter to reflecting on lessons from the pandemic and our response, and what we might have to deal with next. Climate change and industrial agriculture are increasing the chances of a new pandemic. The scientific strength of the USA, which was so crucial in the development of vaccines, is being undermined by its own government. But the greatest threat to our ability to respond, Hendy suggests, may be the maelstrom of mis- and dis-information which fueled the attacks on scientists. It’s only getting worse.

To finish on a positive note, I ended my conversation with Hendy by discussing what he was most proud of. He told me about the work they had done to combine mathematical models with information on the subtle changes in the virus’s genetic code as it passed from person to person “We’d hear about the case in the evening. Then we're all waiting for the genomics results, which will come through the next morning. The genomics were giving us a sense of how many links in the transmission chain there were between different cases. Then we’d combine that with our modeling, and you could use our model to estimate how many other cases might be out there. I have to give a shoutout to the ESR⁵ team and Joep de Ligt who spearheaded that genomics work.”

I could see immediately why this appealed – it’s exactly why Te Pūnaha Matatini exists, to draw different disciplines together to solve real problems. And it’s a reminder of what we need to tackle other complex problems, such as climate change, our low economic productivity, deteriorating environment and rising inequality. We can’t solve these problems with little bits of cherry-picked research. We need a strong, collaborative and inclusive science sector.

1. Published by Bridget Williams Books.

2. The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, at Victoria University of Wellington.

3. The full name is Mycoplasma bovis, and there’s no easy common name because it can cause a number of different conditions in cattle, all of which could also have other causes.

4. Shaun Hendy won in 2012 and Siouxsie Wiles in 2013, before the establishment of Te Pūnaha Matatini. Rebecca Priestly won in 2016. The 2022 winner, Dianne Sika-Paotonu is also part of Te Pūnaha Matatini.

5. The Institute of Environmental Science and Research