I hope Mr Hipkins doen’t tell me off, but some things about our ‘South Auckland family’ don’t add up. Is it alright to talk about it? After all, the repercussions are destroying the livelihoods of many of our Auckland friends and costing the country billions, so everything should be subject to scrutiny at this stage, don’t you think?
We learned on Tuesday 11 August, and the following days, that an unwell male, in his fifties, presented to his GP on Monday 10 August with symptoms and was swabbed for a COVID sample, testing positive twice. By the following day the sample had been notified and a second, also positive, sample taken and analysed. Not only that, but the six other family ‘household’ members who live with him had been tested, with three of the further six testing positive by mid-afternoon Tuesday. That’s, of itself, a minor-miracle turn-around time given results normally take 24 hours to materialise, but I suppose they were designated priority, or something, and by 4pm Tuesday the 11th the hammer began dropping on the entire population of unfortunate Auckland.
Mr Bloomfield, with hand on heart and all the certainty possible, claimed, in response to a press question on the 11th, that the gentleman concerned had displayed symptoms for “four or five days” before presenting at his GP. We now know that was not true: that is not to say Mr Bloomfield lied, but that the statement is simply untrue because during the COVID Update of August 13th both the prime minister and Mr Bloomfield confirmed that, in fact, the correct date of the gentleman’s first symptoms was July 31st. We never went ‘100-Days’ COVID-free.
So what? Well, here’s the interesting thing from the Alert Level 3 announcement on the 11th:
“Media: And what kind of symptoms are the cases showing? Are they quite severe symptoms?
Dr Ashley Bloomfield: So the person who presented as the first case did have fever, a cough—you know, so quite noticeable symptoms. The partner of that person also had obvious symptoms—in fact, that preceded that of the case that we diagnosed first“.
So: the partner of Index One was ill and displaying “obvious” COVID symptoms “preceding” our “first” documented resurgence case, taking the possible timeline further back, raising further questions and nullifying others. For instance: if ‘Index One’s’ partner actually contracted COVID first then Index One’s employment at the Americold coolstore is completely irrelevant, a totally unnecessary and unfair slur on the business, a Herring Red, and a very wet rag to the ‘came in on frozen peas from Melbourne’ governing coalition’s ‘Dunno how it got here’ conspiracy theory.
Over to you, Mr Hipkins but please: don’t get angry, remember to watch your peas and (Managed Isolation and Quarantine) queues, they’re splitting.
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