Capture and Contain Naurus Response to COVID19
[Music]
in my language that means greetings but
it’s more than a greeting
it basically means all that is good is
which upon you
i come from a country that is quite
small in comparison to the world
we are a population of roughly 12 000
people
and as a country that is small we are
very much family oriented
we’re a country that is very much as the
words express
for example we don’t have words for
nephew
niece uncle aunty for us the word
son daughter father or mother
is used instead of niece nephew
uncle or auntie or even cousins they’re
called brothers or a sister
in our language that means we are a
country that is very close
knitted together and we are close to it
because of our customs
because of our ethnicity and us as a
people
our history is a history like other
countries it is filled with heartbreak
it is filled with triumphs
it is filled with victories filled with
sadness
in our history we’ve got also a history
of decimation
there’s been numerous threats on our
tiny nation
and we have survived over our short
history
the figure of 1500 has commonly been
used as a benchmark for nationhood
and if the population count falls below
1500 in some cases here in nari went
down to as low as 500
it was considered unsustainable
unsustainable in the sense that you
cannot survive as a nation
there were two events in particular that
put our population
and us our nation at great risk of being
decimated
one was the 1920 influenza epidemic and
secondly was world war ii nuru’s history
of tribulation provides us valuable
lessons
and inspires any leader of naaru as he
did for us
when the coronavirus broke out it is a
story about resilience
the family unit and its value in times
of national trials is things that has
kept us together
during national crisis as i have
described through the flu epidemic in
the second world war
they became personal trials because a
death involved in one
neuron family is a death basically
involving everybody else
on island because we are a tight-knit
community
a death in a tight-knit community means
that it is
felt by the whole extended family not
just a nuclear’s family
now therefore when tragedy occurs it
occurs
it happens to neurons in a very personal
way therefore and therefore the whole
clan of the whole tribe is affected by
that tragedy
the events of world war ii and the flu
epidemic are ingrained in the memory of
many of the ruins today
because these are stories passed down
from generation to generation
stories of tragedy stories of survival
at the same time and i want to highlight
something that what is considered to be
an epidemic
in other parts of the world is a
pandemic here in nauru because of our
small size
what is considered to be a pandemic in
other parts of the world
would be considered a holocaust here and
because we are
one family it means basically that we
have to to protect the whole of naro we
start from protecting one
because the protecting of one is the
protecting of the whole
country and we must protect ourselves
as a family of neurons the events that
have shaped and influenced
our policy in regards to responding to
the covet 19
virus well i’ll break it down for you
one we learned it we took lessons
from our history our history of making
sure that
what happened in regards to nuru in the
past when
our population was nearly decimated we
nearly lost
our identity as a people that was one
lesson learned from our history
make sure we do not respond we make sure
we do not repeat history again
that was one lesson that means we had to
be well prepared
we had to be better armed and respond to
this enemy which is covered 19.
it means being proactive it means
responding immediately so that
we do not allow this enemy onto our
territory
because history has taught us also that
once an enemy is on your soil as it
happens during world war in the flu
epidemic
our very existence as a nation is
threatened
and the results are devastating
we as a government were determined not
to let another world event decimate
basically us and make sure that history
is not repeated again here in naru
therefore this government monitored the
situation of the covet 19 very carefully
and responded very quickly to carrying
declaring a state of national emergency
on the 16th of march 2020 for the
management and the minimization of the
impact of coronavirus
now what we did was we put in place a
policy
called capture and contain and that’s
basically using
our plane because we still need to ferry
passenger passengers in and out of naro
the ships that still needs to bring
cargo in and out of normal as part of
our extended border
so we captured those borders we captured
everybody on the plane
we captured everybody on a ship and we
contained them and in that containment
we made sure we did all the necessary
testing
to make sure that the way we are
responding to the pandemic
that’s happening around the world is a
positive thing for naaru in our
capturing containment policy
also we reached out earlier to our
international partners for their support
towards
our effort in responding to the pandemic
engagement with partners resulted in
very
very valuable support to our health
system our customers at our border
control
sector and also gave us budgetary
support and
we really thank our donor partners in
this area australia
taiwan the un agencies pifs
new zealand and all the other in the
united states of america
and all the other countries that have
supported us
naru is not part of any chain and we are
one
nation island nation only with like i
said with a population of roughly about
11
12 000 population 80 percent of our
needs
comes mostly from australia therefore we
could not shut down our borders
therefore hitting the right balance in
our contain capture and containment
policy
was very important this also meant that
the borders of other countries were used
as bulwarks
against anything that would come in our
direction their quarantine measures
was another layer of defense for us so
therefore our strongest
offensive against covet 19 was is in
fact
our strongest defense against it and to
implement the strategies we had to
protect our borders at all costs
identify transit stations and rules and
resource them appropriately
applying the lessons from history we had
to review our disaster management act to
make sure we provided the legal basis
for our decision we maintain strong
leadership
both nationally and internationally for
example our health medium pleased to
extensive community awareness to educate
and inform people about the virus
and as president i provided weekly media
situational media updates for the people
of nauru
about what their government is doing and
the progress we are doing in regards to
protecting us
from covert 19 and to allay any fears
and misconceptions
further abroad we also engage with
leaders regionally and internationally
about strategies because if it works for
us then it surely must work for others
also
and that has enabled us to be strong
nationally and internationally
in closing what i would like to say also
is that one of the
biggest things we set up in regards to
our capturing containment policy was
what we called our task force
this was led by our minister for health
and included many other ministers that
were part of it
other members of our public service and
other members of the business sector
and therefore what they did and the
plans they put together
was basically looking things as a whole
for naaru
and implemented the necessary basically
anything that was necessary to make sure
that we protected ourselves
and that our capture and containment
policy worked well
our motto on our code of arms is god’s
will first
and by the grace of god we have been
kept safe
thank you
you