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If you were one of many New Zealanders wondering why suddenly, out of the blue and with ZERO community spread, the Director-General of Health last week began reminding us that COVID-19 isn’t over yet and that we should remain prepared for another spike and organize masks, wonder no more.
The overriding reason is, of course, the election and the decision by the Prime Minister to campaign on COVID and COVID alone.
Having decided that, her options became limited. Limited really to only two.
Either the government’s policy would prove to be correct and she could campaign on how wonderfully well they had kept us free of COVID-19 (risky because it’s inevitable that more cases will develop), or we needed to have some community spread to allow a complete reset of Level 2, 3 or 4 responses so she could take centre stage again and be our saviour. (Less risky because the narrative could be controlled).
Understandable really. It’s not like there’s a list of successes for her to campaign on.
They’ve achieved nothing during their incredibly lacklustre 3 years in government other than excessive and useless spending and a list a mile long of complete FAILS.
It is a performance of extraordinary ordinariness.
Without the Christchurch tragedy and COVID-19, this government would go down in history without a single notable event to its record. It has been 3 years of ZERO achievement, which has ironically been given some level of credibility by two horrid disasters, both of which have clearly been completely mismanaged. One with heaps of public hugs and sad faces followed by draconian, useless and stupid changes to gun laws. The other, a series of knee jerk, ill-conceived and ill-thought-out overreactions to a health issue. A health issue moreover that will turn out to be the biggest con in the history of the planet (not that I necessarily blame them exclusively for that part), but Ardern knew how to capture the market with those press conferences and she’s fallen back on that formula again.
Did the government know something about Covid-19 that it wasn’t telling us?
The evidence, despite the denials, is that yes, they did.
It is just not credible that within a period of just a few hours on Tuesday, the Prime Minister took a third of New Zealand’s economy and threw it down the stairs into Level 3 lockdown for the second time, over just four confirmed cases of possible community spread.
If you look at the narrative since last week, the government was clearly positioning for something to happen this week. It would seem that some people in the know had already been prewarned and Cam Slater’s post “Did She Let The Cat Out of the Bag” points to the Prime Minister being less than straight with us last Thursday, long before she says she knew of this community spread.
Only they know what they were thinking, because our most transparent government has turned out to be our most devious and deceitful ever, and I’m picking that we don’t know the half of it yet.
Don’t be surprised if it eventually turns out not to be “community spread” after all and that something slipped through the cracks. Their record on competence speaks for itself, but so too does their record on transparency. On that basis, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that they were even intending to declare an emergency with the next batch of positive tests regardless of their origins. Wait for an announcement saying something like “It was better to go early and hard and save lives than to get it wrong”.
We’re presently living in a room full of smokescreens and mirrors.
They’ve finally worked out what most of us have known all along: you can’t ban the virus with clever words or the stroke of a politician’s pen and you can’t keep the borders closed forever.
Despite what they’ve been saying which we can’t rely on, it remains difficult to understand exactly how closed our borders currently are. There seem to be a hell of a lot of people still flooding home. It’s hard to believe so much of our population has been living overseas.
But closing borders and locking people down never were solutions and there’s plenty of evidence of that readily available from qualified experts all over the world. Why are their common sense comments, studies and solutions not getting equal exposure?
Ultimately, enhanced immunity (herd immunity) is the way to manage the spread of any virus, a matter that is already well documented. Keeping it out as we have done only moves the issue to a later date. That is an inevitability and despite the rhetoric, some experts will have been telling the government this. Even if they haven’t, isn’t it the most basic duty of our elected representatives to find out the facts so they are well informed before crippling the economy and our normal everyday health?
For a good overview of the significance of herd immunity generally and COVID-19, Professor Sunetra Gupta, a theoretical epidemiologist at Oxford University, provides an intelligent perspective.
But let me end with a quote from Aynsley Kellow (a Kiwi by the way), Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Tasmania, from an article “COVID-19 and the Problem with Official Science” published in Quadrant on Line on 22 June:
“All the evidence on the IFR [Infection Fatality Rate] of COVID-19 suggests it is about as lethal as seasonal flu, and we would do well to recall that the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu killed an estimated one million worldwide and about 100,000 in the US, but did not even lead to the cancellation of the Woodstock festival.”
To be blunt, I’m not nearly as concerned about catching COVID-19 as I am about the integrity of our leadership.
Or maybe I’ve just become too cynical.
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