I decided to give in and apply for my COVID passport. Here it is.
Pretty neat, don’t you think?
I’m not sure it will make my life any easier though, as each day seems to bring more and more proposed restrictions. Now it seems that we may need to take a COVID test to go to the South Island.
Wasn’t vaccination supposed to make us free from all this?
Covid-19 modeller and physicist Dr Dion O’Neale said a case in the South Island could spread undetected more easily than in the North.
“We’ve seen that their testing rates are slightly lower than the rest of the country, and they’re possibly maybe a little bit less alert,” O’Neale said.
“At alert level 2 you can do most of your day-to-day things – you can meet up with a lot of people, and that puts you in an environment where if someone was highly infectious, it could spread quite quickly to a lot of people.”
Yes, but wasn’t this what getting the vaccine was all about? You know… to stop people catching it, or getting very sick if they did?
He said not having a hard border out of the Waikato left the possibility of cases trickling out, and requiring a negative test to get out should be considered.
“That is maybe something the government would want to be thinking about: what requirements would they want to have on people leaving the Waikato region? Or possibly, even as the Waikato outbreak spreads even more through the North Island, leaving the North Island into areas that are currently Covid-free or mostly Covid-free, like the South Island?”
All this, of course, is because a case has turned up in Blenheim.
A Covid-19 modeller thinks the government should make it a requirement for those travelling to the South Island to first provide a negative test result.
The top of the South Island has had a Labour Weekend scare with an imported Covid-19 case from the North Island shopping at Blenheim on Friday.
The unvaccinated person flew in from Rotorua, and has links to Te Awamutu in the Waikato where there have been around a dozen community cases recently.
Before testing positive the person went to a couple of Blenheim supermarkets, a pharmacy, a bakery and a Mitre 10.
Okay, so he tested positive… but he obviously wasn’t very sick, if he could wander around the town, visiting a number of stores.
But so far there has not been any onward transmission, with three of the person’s contacts returning negative results, and the same for the hundreds of community tests taken over the weekend.
Doesn’t stop the panic though, does it?
So he wasn’t sick, nobody has caught it from him, but now we are hearing suggestions that everyone should have a test to go to the South Island… on the strength of someone who was not sick and did not transmit the disease.
Has the world gone completely mad? We are going to lock off the South Island – or force people to take tests – because someone who was COVID-positive visited one town? It never seems to enter anyone’s head that the test result may have been inaccurate.
Do you remember how we used to send lepers to special islands so they did not infect anyone?
“Cautious optimism. People have said we’ve dodged a bullet – well I think the bullet’s been going now for quite some time, and we just have to do what we can … to keep it out of the South Island for as long as we can,” Leggett said.
He said it showed how easily a case can jump Cook Strait, and some mainlanders are wondering why there were no more border barriers to stop it from happening.
“People would be asking that question, and certainly a number of people have suggested to me we should have a much tighter border control.”
RNZ
Don’t think it won’t happen. The summer season is coming up, and if we are allowed to travel at all, there will be lots of hoops to jump through just to prove that we don’t have a virus that does not kill 98% of people… and does not kill approximately 99.5% of people who are vaccinated… which is most eligible New Zealanders now.
Good luck to those owners of hotels, motels, AirBnB houses, pubs, restaurants and tourist attractions who thought they might be able to rely on Kiwi travellers to get them through another very tough season.
Just think. Two years ago, we were able to go to Europe for our holidays. Now we can’t even travel between islands. We were told that, if we got vaccinated, we would be free of restrictions. Now we have more restrictions than ever before. Eight people died over the holiday weekend in car accidents, but we don’t ban cars…
We’re never going to get out of this… are we?
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