Siouxsie Wiles wants a word with your parents
Such is the importance of New Zealanders getting behind the requirement to self-isolate, Siouxsie Wiles has been offering to personally telephone the parents of people worried they’re not taking it seriously enough. To save her repeating herself all night, we asked the tireless microbiologist and science communicator to commit it to video. If you have a parent, child, uncle, aunt, cousin, neighbour, friend or other human acquaintance who is not quite getting the importance of staying at home for the next four weeks, pick up the phone and play them this.
“Hi, I’m Dr Siouxsie Wiles and I’ve got a message for you: Stay at home. No sneaking out to have a quick walk with somebody two metres apart, no sneaking off to have a quick BBQ or a coffee with somebody. Stay at home.
“If you don’t stay at home, then we’re going to have to stay in lockdown for longer than four weeks. Do you really want to be here for longer than four weeks? I don’t think so. Stay at home. Don’t leave your bubble, don’t interfere in someone else’s bubble. Stay at home.”
For more information on what’s required in alert level four, and what you can and can’t do, see our explainer here – and check out the official guidelines here.
Siouxsie Wiles
Dr Siouxsie Wiles is an Associate Professor and head of the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab at the University of Auckland. She and her team make nasty bacteria glow in the dark to find new medicines and to study how bacteria evolve to cause disease. Siouxsie recently published her first book, Antibiotic Resistance: the End of Modern Medicine? She is also a keen blogger, tweeter and podcaster and is the 2021 Te Pou Whakarae o Aotearoa Kiwibank New Zealander of the Year.
