World-Beating Performance

 

We’ve just passed the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. New Zealand has had just five twenty-five. We are now putting in place quarantine hotels for incomers, but it will take two weeks to implement. The first returnees from Wuhan last year were quarantined - in hotels - on arrival immediately. The first cases of incoming virus from Europe were reported almost straight after this, but what was the Government’s response? Nothing, nada, zilch. The airports remained open and people were flooding in from all over Europe, where the pandemic was starting to take hold. What was the New Zealand Government’s response? Shutdown: no-one in and no-one out and total isolation for the infected and their contacts. Result, virtually zero problem.

This Government reacts to everything. Just very slowly. Then reacts against the next development. Just very slowly. We are now the worst Covid-affected nation on Earth, per capita; yet still the vacillation continues just as the vaccination stutters. Someone really should brief our sorry bunch of incompetents that decisive means actually making decisions in the moment, not with what seems to be a stock delay of ‘two weeks’, and sticking to those decisions until there is clarity as to the results and consequences of those decisions. Just like New Zealand. Let’s face it, we are both island nations, which confers the obvious physical advantage of geographical separation from others. Take back control of our borders? Ha! Propagandist tosh that means absolutely nothing, with or without a pandemic.

It might be too late to be learning any lessons - from a practical perspective we seem to be going nowhere anyway - but by God, a touch of humility and consistency in the Government’s response would go a very long way to make people feel a little more supportive of our necessary, collective effort and to stop whingeing on about the infringement of their rights. The right to get sick and die? It’s understandable that people are getting rattled: the plethora of confusing messages issued almost daily by the Government do absolutely nothing to inspire confidence in them or that they might have even the remotest clue what they’re doing in this situation. And -  I haven’t yet mentioned the economic aftermath that awaits those who survive, with or without severe post-viral complications: I’ll return to that can of worms in a later post.