According to the Slang Dictionary an 18-wheeler is a colloquial name for a semitrailer truck with 18 total wheels, and by extension, any large truck. It is an American term as here in New Zealand our High Productivity trucks (the ones with the yellow ‘H’) typically have nine axles and 34 wheels.
I choose the 18-wheeler for this analogy as at the time of writing there had been, tragically, 18 deaths ascribed to the COVID-19 pandemic here in New Zealand.
The latest figures available on the Health Department website for deaths per year is 2017. Allowing for the population growth to the end of 2019, the daily death rate in New Zealand would be 95.
That means that over the Level 4 lockdown period there will have been 3,230 deaths in the BAU (business as usual) case.
Were the TVNZ reporters standing outside the premises involved in the other 3,212 devastating family circumstances bringing us live reports from the scene each night?
We were sold a model that the country was going to be overrun with 80,000 deaths and on that basis have crashed our economy.
In spite of his mangling of the phrase, Simon Bridges may have been on to something when he tried to say that the cure is worse than the disease.
Will there be a Royal Commission looking into all this when the dust settles?
Will there be any accountability for the ongoing deaths from poverty, business crash suicides, delayed operations, delayed treatment, delayed diagnoses and so forth?
Will there be a reckoning at the ballot box?
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