A little over two months ago, in early March, 50 infectious disease experts signed off an editorial published in the New Zealand Medical Journal calling on politicians to “avoid scaremongering” over the impending COVID invasion of this country.
Some of their colleagues had been beavering away for the best part of a month modelling “scenarios” for a possible COVID outbreak. Professor Michael Baker “reiterated any modelling work was just that – ‘a scenario’ – not reality.” Preliminary work had concluded that, based on historical parallels, in a New Zealand setting, COVID may have an R0 transmission rate of 1.69 (averaged), but when the report was finalised, they used an R0 of 2.5 as ‘most plausible’ given unknowns and, one supposes, prudent use of the precautionary principle; that’s fair enough.
The report was published by the Ministry of Health prior to lockdown on March 23rd. Under the scenarios presented, and only if social-distancing and good hygiene practices failed to slow transmission, New Zealand could face losing between 8,560 and 12,700 souls to the invader over the track of the infection. That’s when things got interesting. Because lead researcher Nick Wilson was immediately tasked with coming up with a “worse case” scenario. One has to ask: why?
The March 23rd report had been a month or more in the making by a team of researchers, Wilson was now, working alone it seems, charged to produce the worse case outlook in 24 hours. Phew! But he did it. ‘Worse case’ published March 24th, upped the victims to 27,600, principally by quintupling one of the input parameters:
Hardly realistic.
Nick’s work, stretching credibility to breaking point, would be in vain. Two days later, after the lockdown began, the ‘Lady Wiles’ Jacinda Ardern’s crack team of number-crunchers would be all over the press with even scarier and more unrealistic numbers but within a week-or-so Ardern would be quoting figures provided, supposedly, “on the eve of lockdown” by a bloke, unknown to epidemiology, named Rodney Jones. Thus the 80,000 myth, or lie, was born.
Ardern clearly took the advice published in NZMJ by 50 experts. She avoided “scaremongering” by switching mode straight to outright doom-porn mongering. One has to ask: why?
We have a right to know the answer to that question because those nonsense numbers “just that – ‘a scenario’ – not reality” were used to blow an actual, real, huge, hole in our economy forcing tens of thousands already and with more to come, into the cold arms of misery and poverty, of unemployment and business ruin.
So: why were those initial numbers artificially inflated, then re-inflated, then quoted, so completely and utterly irresponsibly?
Why?
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