Rt Hon Helen Clark speaks to Stuff's Quarantine Nation podcast

Quarantine Nation is Stuff's eight-part podcast series that revisits the Covid-19 pandemic with the benefit of hindsight.

In this extended interview, Foundation patron and former Prime Minister Helen Clark shares her recollections and thoughts. She first began tracking Covid-19 through reports of a new virus in Wuhan in late 2019. Within weeks, she recognised the seriousness of the threat and, by February, believed crucial time was slipping away.

Helen revisits what she describes as the “critically lost month,” when the scale of the danger had yet to fully register globally. Drawing on her experience with past health crises such as HIV, SARS and Ebola, she outlines why strict lockdowns became New Zealand’s primary option, how international systems coped under strain, and why Covid-19 stands as the country’s most significant public health challenge in more than a century.

The conversation also raises pressing questions about whether earlier containment was possible and how prepared we are for future outbreaks, themes explored across all eight episodes of the series, now available on major podcast platforms.