David Theobald
7 am on Thursday 16th April 2020 and I am more nervous about this whole bloody mess we find ourselves in than at any time since it all started. We are six hours away from an announcement which will (might?) detail what will be imposed on our lives in the next stage of this national and international cluster.
I have long (and what is long in this ever-changing landscape – a week, a couple of weeks?) said that I think the cure is going to be more injurious than the disease. I am writing this in a country that has fifteen people in the hospital from a viral illness. Fifteen. There have been nine deaths – all tragic at a family level – of people already in the final phases of their lives. And yet this health catastrophe has led our government to bring the country to its knees now and for the foreseeable future.
This has been based on mathematical modelling which in turn is based in questionable data at best. Our political leaders, who have been shown up to be intellectual midgets forever, have chosen one set of experts and seemingly will brook no other opinion. The focus is, and apparently remains, purely health-based. We are in a quest to ‘eliminate’ the virus. This is as daft as it is impossible. You cannot eliminate it.
We have to work out ways of living with it inside our community. We know nowhere near enough about the disease from a clinical point of view to be able to do this with any certainty but it would appear that the current ‘lockdown’ for everyone is almost certainly too much.
I think our current health model is the wrong way round. We need to be like one of those Lindt spherical chocolates (some of which I still have left over from Christmas) that are hard on the outside and soft in the middle. We are the opposite. Our border is soft (and when it mattered, it was downright runny) and our centre is hard. It is so hard that it will destroy the whole if it is just given time.
And this is my fear bordering on terror as to what our “Fearless Leader” Jacinda Ardern is going to announce at One O’clock. She is public approval driven and knows she is never going to be criticised for being over cautious now. It matters to her not at all that to stay in Level 4 Lite will have dire consequences ( even deaths, the avoidance of which she values above all else at present) some way down the track.
She will announce Level 3 (it doesn’t really matter what it is called) and will then make up what that means pretty much on the fly. She doesn’t have the intellectual candlepower to do anything else. As I alluded to above, I think it will be more Level 4 Lite than a beefed up Level 2. We have no idea what it will be and no idea how long it will last.
She announces it today but cabinet will not decide whether it will be enforced until Monday. This is very smart. It gives her four days to prevaricate and change things according to what people think of her cunning plan. This has been her MO for her entire premiership and I see no reason, when her back is against the wall like never before, for her to change.
This is giving the decision to a working group on steroids.
Postscript:
Well, all my fears I expressed when I wrote this yesterday have been realised. An unknown period of Level 4 Lite and the absolute devastation that will have on our lives for a long time awaits us.
Just as worrying is the increasing confidence and apparent enjoyment our “Fearless Leader” Jacinda Ardern is developing in her role as dictator.
A black day, indeed.
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