Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
It’s amazing how few people question authority during a crisis, and how easily and quickly a crisis can be used for other purposes by ethically flexible governments. Ours is no exception.
People really started getting scared when coronavirus hit Italy, a first world country we could all relate to. The death toll seemed staggering. But was it?
FACTS AND NUMBERS: ITALY AND NEW ZEALAND
Italy’s first case of coronavirus was announced on February 15. As of today (12 April), it has had 147,577 cases and 18,849 deaths (Worldometer). This works out to 322 deaths per million people in Italy. Compare this with heart disease, which kills 649.5 people per million each year in Italy (World Life Expectancy).
Yes, the numbers are huge in Italy. But there’s also been a fair amount of spin by the media. This quite clearly isn’t the Black Death we’re dealing with, which wiped out close to half of Europe’s population at the time. It’s nowhere close.
Compare Italy to New Zealand. Our first case was announced on February 28, almost exactly two weeks after Italy. We’ve had 0.8 deaths per million in our population from coronavirus at present, compared with 722.9 deaths per million from heart disease. All of our coronavirus victims in New Zealand have been elderly.
We can reasonably say we have a heart disease crisis in New Zealand. I do not think we can reasonably say, medically speaking, that we have a coronavirus crisis.
We may have potential for disaster without any mitigation at all, but first we need to understand what is happening, how it is happening, and to what extent it is happening, here in New Zealand. These keys will enable us, as a society, to understand the best approach to dealing with the virus in New Zealand.
Facts are our friends. Feelings are not.
MIXED MESSAGES FROM GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA
Our Government is not being open and transparent.
We are receiving constant mixed messages regarding the use of masks (yes, you should be wearing one!) and the amount of PPE available to our medical staff.
Clusters of cases are not being reported or are being mishandled until the Government is unable to hide them any longer – the Spectrum Care cluster in Auckland being just the latest of these.
Reports continue to circulate of citizens unable to get tested or refused testing for the virus, and rumours abound of the Government “tweaking” numbers down to reflect a much lower caseload than what is really occurring in the community.
On top of this, to the best of my knowledge, there is no testing of asymptomatic people occurring in New Zealand at all.
HOW DANGEROUS IS THE VIRUS REALLY?
Indications are that the virus can be dangerous if you are elderly, ill or immune-compromised. Data coming out of South Korea suggests that vast numbers of younger people can be asymptomatic carriers and perfectly healthy. As the virus can be easily transmitted from asymptomatic individuals, this is a pertinent point – and one that our health authorities seem to be almost intentionally missing.
This all fits in with Italian data which strongly indicates that those who become symptomatic and visibly ill with coronavirus are the elderly and infirm. Serious cases become symptomatic, non-serious ones slip beneath the radar.
In short, for most of us, if you are well, you should be safe. It can make you sick, but you are unlikely to become a fatality. Pre-existing conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity, make recovery more difficult, and smokers are more likely to have severe symptoms (Source: Wikipedia).
Think of coronavirus like the opposite of the Titanic’s iceberg: most of the cases are below the surface and not visible but, unlike the iceberg, it is the visible part of the cohort that we as a community must worry about.
The devil of the situation is how to identify and protect our “visible iceberg” people when most of the cases remain unknown in the community. This is why medical experts across the globe are calling to Test, test, test – and this is exactly what our Government is not doing.
We still, as far as I am aware, haven’t even begun to test a control group in the community – people who have not been in contact with any cases and are not symptomatic.
We have no idea what is out there, because we are not even looking for it.
It’s almost like we don’t want to know.
LOCKDOWN IS POINTLESS WITHOUT AN EXIT STRATEGY
I do not believe our Government are all complete idiots. Yet there seems to be little planning and organisation, little understanding of this disease, and a mass panic going on behind the scenes.
Epidemiologically speaking, the New Zealand lockdown is of course complete rubbish. Locking people separately in their homes while forcing them to visit the same small number of supermarkets over and over on a regular basis is foolish and poorly planned, and not going to do much at all to stop a virus in its tracks.
Instead, it is likely to create virus hotspots, which will no doubt become more evident as time goes on (remembering that this virus has a long incubation period).
At the same time, there has been no organised mass protection of our elderly and vulnerable, indicating that our health authorities still fail to grasp who is actually at risk here, and are unable to adapt as more data about the virus comes to light. There is no nationwide delivery service for food and other essentials organised for them, and no support network organised to keep them separated from their healthier, younger peers.
Meanwhile, banning singular activities such as surfing, sea swimming, hunting, fishing, going to an empty beach for a walk, driving in private cars etc. – none of this does anything to curtail a virus. None of it. It seems to have no point beyond being an exercise in overt authoritarianism.
I don’t know if all this is teaching New Zealanders to obey. I genuinely hope it isn’t.
As far as bringing everyone back to work, there seems to be no plan or timeline. While saving lives is important, we must remember what we’re saving lives for. We also need to ask, “How many lives?” and “At what cost?“
I’m not sure the Government has handled any of this effectively, and I’m not certain at all that the lockdown will prove to have been useful or sensible in hindsight.
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