Alex Davis
theemperorsrobes.blogspot.com
Over two weeks ago in my article, “Both of NZ’s Post COVID Futures Are Bad: Part Three. Our Political and Academic Leaders Need to Admit They Made a Terrible Mistake” published on June 3rd, I predicted that New Zealand could not keep COVID-19 out.
That prediction is now proving 100% correct. Barely a week into level 1 and with the borders supposedly closed we have:
- Six people absconding from a funeral
- Two women taking a road trip from Auckland to Wellington and creating over 300 “close contacts”
- Revelations that testing is not even mandatory in quarantine.
As I outlined, it was almost certain that COVID-19 would return to New Zealand. Even with traffic across the border reduced to less than 5%, there are still too many movements and COVID-19 is too contagious to feasibly prevent every single case of re-entry. That high probability was made inevitable by the incompetence of Ardern and her government. The government is now scrambling to contain the outbreak at both the health and public relations level.
The latest outbreak, however, raises the much broader issue I discussed in detail in my article “Both of NZ’s Post COVID Futures Are Bad: Part Two. A Return to Normality Is Neither Simple nor Guaranteed.“
Even if we somehow manage to stamp this outbreak out, what then? How long can we continue to play national “whack a mole”? How long before an outbreak occurs that we can’t contain? Given that we know up to 20% of US cases came from a single individual, there is a high probability that eventually a case will slip though and give rise to uncontrollable reinfection.
At that point all the sacrifices by the “team of 5 million” will have been in vain: all the funerals missed, the jobs and businesses lost, the suicides, the billions spent, the mothers unable to say goodbye to dead children: ALL will have been for nothing. Except of course for those members of the community who openly ignored the rules – like the 50+ funeral held at Karetu, Te Tai Tokerau on March 28th.
However, there is actually a worse outcome than COVID-19 getting back in: that is that the government actually succeeds in keeping it out. What no one in the media or the many policy wonks in Wellington seem yet to have asked Ardern is: “What is your long-term plan, beyond praying for a vaccine?”
As I explained in my previous article, the rest of the world will eventually develop herd immunity to COVID-19, but New Zealanders “safe” behind our borders will not. The rest of the world will move on and will return to growth and travel and trade. We won’t. How long do we actually plan to stay like this? One year? Two years? Five years? A decade? Two decades? It is quite simply non-viable. We will slowly but surely suffocate and stagnate in a prison we willingly walked into.
If you want to see what the future of New Zealand looks like under this scenario look to East Germany under the USSR, North Korea or Cuba (interestingly all experiments in the creed of socialism Ardern subscribes to).
So, what should we do instead? Here’s my 5 cents worth:
First, we should have used the valuable time we were gifted through our geographic isolation to build a world-class contact tracing system (like the one Taiwan built). What have we done? Nothing effective.
Second, we should have taken the $20 billion we have spent and invested it into:
a) rapidly building high-quality health care facilities specifically designed to protect the elderly (where the overwhelming portion of deaths offshore and in New Zealand have been). For $20 billion we could have had 14 new hospitals the size of the new hospital in Dunedin which serves the entire lower South Island (we would have had those new hospitals for use afterwards as well).
b) Preparing the health system for those small number of people who would fall sick when COVID-19 eventually returns. We still haven’t done this. There has been no ramp up in ICU beds or ventilators despite the fact it’s almost certain COVID-19 will return.
Third, we should then open the border and accept COVID-19 will come back in with the full confidence that as the data clearly shows offshore unless you are 70+ AND very ill most people will experience either no symptoms or only extremely mild symptoms. The vast majority of the population will be unaffected and the vulnerable will be safe. Then as more and more New Zealanders develop their own herd immunity, we can lower the defences at the various aged care facilities and treat COVID-19 exactly the same way we treat normal seasonal influenza (hygiene and keeping sick people away).
This is not rocket science. Which poses the question: why is the government not doing this? There are two potential answers to this question:
First, they are chronically incompetent. This is the charitable interpretation and based on their many failures it is also logically appealing and evidentially sound.
Second, the less charitable interpretation is that the fight against COVID-19 has increasingly become less about health outcomes and more about Ardern’s political future and her international reputation. Ardern and her government were almost certainly headed for defeat in November 2020 prior to COVID-19 – even the most ardent Labour supporters recognised that her government was uniquely incompetent and incapable of delivering on any of the many promises they made prior to 2017; an election they genuinely did not believe they would win.
However, COVID-19 intervened, and while the rest of New Zealand suffered, Ardern benefited from wall to wall, unquestioning media coverage and adoration. She simply cannot now turn around and admit the vast strategic error she has made: it would make a mockery of all the “early and hard”, “team of 5 million” and “be kind” sound bites she relentlessly spoon-fed the media and the public. She is committed and thus so are we. As Euripides warned: “When one with honeyed words but evil mind persuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” I truly hope for New Zealand’s sake this scenario is not the case but the more I watch Ardern the more I fear she has become addicted to the limelight. As George Santayana said: “The highest form of vanity is love of fame.”
Having made a prediction two weeks ago that has transpired exactly as forecast, I’ll take my chances on another: the most likely outcome from here is that at some point over the next six months COVID-19 will become re-established in New Zealand. The health authorities will fight an ineffective battle to contain it, but like a farmer with a sack beating back a bush fire, it will eventually sweep across the country.
There will be calls for another lockdown: politically and economically whoever is in power will be caught between Scylla and Charybdis, and my guess is they will acquiesce in allowing the virus to spread while trying to maintain as much political distance as possible from the Ministry of Health and immigration officials they will scapegoat for the “failures”.
IF (and that’s a big IF) on the other hand they manage to keep COVID-19 out, eventually, as the country grows poorer, more isolated and more dismal the pressure will become too much. After a time whoever is in charge, like the ruler of a besieged city of starving inhabitants, will willingly walk to the walls, throw open the gates and let the COVID-19 invader back in. And thus New Zealand will come full circle back to where it started but vastly poorer for Ardern’s grand “elimination” strategy.
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