Covid-19

While Covid-19 is a human disease sweeping the world, it exhibits similarities with invasive predators and shows the difficulties of eradication and reinvasion prevention.

The rapid establishment, development and acceleration of the global coronavirus pandemic has very quickly introduced people across the world to biological patterns that are all too familiar to predation scientists. And as with predation, for some individuals their interaction with this invasive organism has sadly been fatal, the outcome of most predatory interactions.

New Zealand’s response to Covid-19 has been world-leading and currently the novel coronavirus is considered to be eliminated from Aotearoa as there is no transmission of the virus within the community. Understanding how this was achieved illustrates many parallels between fighting to eradicate a virus and fighting to eradicate predators. So does the eradication of Covid-19 tell us anything about the eradication of invasive predators?

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