The Labour Government Covid Scanning App. It’s going to save us all I tell you! Well, that’s what they keep telling us, so it must be true.
Of course, it can’t stop you from getting the actual disease but is it even useful for tracking the movements of infected people? If only 5% odd of the population is using it, is it causing more harm than good?
Your Government controllers all think it is a marvellous thing and would point to the recent failures of border control quarantine ‘community transmission’ issues in Northland and Auckland’s North Shore as major success stories and vindication of the app’s premier role in preventing the spread of the 2020/2021 flu.
To be honest, I think the entire thing is bad for our health.
It turned out that I was deemed to be a ‘casual contact’ of one of those deemed a ‘close contact’ of the “Assiduous” Ruakaka Super Tourist.
The reason for this is that I had had a ten minute conversation with, and twice hugged, a friend of mine at a party the night before news of the awful outbreak was released. That friend worked at one of the many retail establishments that the well-travelled WuPox-carrying Northland shopper had graced with her presence.
Minister Hipkins was quick to tell us all that we were in mortal danger if we had been anywhere near any of the establishments that the woman had visited, and my friend was ordered to take a Covid test. This all went quite well; she didn’t have to join the two day queue at the local nose scraping centre but rather was able to sit at home and wait for a MoH van to come to her.
As she waited for her results, a couple of the folk at the party were advised of the situation by my friend. Turns out that we were all supposed to self-isolate until my friend received her results, and apparently we were urged to go and get a test ourselves. I only knew this as it was mentioned on a family Facebook post. MoH never contacted me, so I declined the suggestion of the test and, having figured that there aren’t too many people I could infect out on the briny, I went jet-skiing instead.
But others who had been at the party started freaking out. One, who is a nurse, grabbed another and both drove 40 minutes to her medical centre in the central city where they were able to jump the queue and get a quick test. They and others from the party were stood down from their jobs until the results came back. But, within 24 hours, the party-goers were spread from Hawkes Bay to the Far North. Much anguish and stress was visited upon all these people and their families.
Within a couple of days, my friend’s negative result was in and so everyone was ordered back to work. Well for about four hours anyway as my ‘close contact’ friend then started “showing symptoms” and was forced to undergo a second test. We were all apparently to self isolate again and encouraged to go and get another test ourselves! But still, I had no contact from anyone official.
Fortunately, the second test results came back quickly and, being negative again, everyone was again ordered back to work.
Of course, I never received any contact from the Ministry of Health and there was no way that I was going to wait on the phone for the Covid Helpline because when my nurse friend had rung it she found that she was 274th in the queue! I kid you not, there were actually 273 people on the phone to Helpline in front of her.
But the way I figure it is this. If there were at that moment, 274 people so stressed about their health that they were literally giving up hours of their time, waiting to be told ‘stay home if you feel sick and go and get a test if you get symptoms’, there must’ve been thousands, maybe even tens of thousands who were worried about this latest super-duper outbreak of the allegedly ultra-transmissible pox to the point of harming their own mental health.
We have all seen how we ourselves, our families and our friends have dealt with the constant stress of being told that if we don’t vote for Jacinda take it all seriously and be good comrades we will all die. The strain of all this deliberate scaring of the population must be phenomenal.
I had friends calling me up because they knew I was in Mangawhai, a supposed hotspot of that outbreak, and they were worried that I was going to get a runny nose and die. We had a person cancel a visit as they sometimes visited someone with cancer and didn’t want to take the risk of visiting Mangawhai in case they killed their friend! The entire situation was absurd.
So my thoughts are this. If the Wupox Super-Shopper hadn’t been such a prolific user of the Covid App, we would have all been blissfully unaware of the possible, but blown out of all proportion, dangers.
None of us would have known that there was a chance we might get a sniffle just because we bought a pack of cheese sizzlers a few days later from the same superette she patronised.
None of our old people would’ve queued up for two days to get a cottonbud shoved into their brains because the newspaper said the woman went knick-knack shopping in their local homeware store.
And no one would’ve been sent home from work and forced to hide inside, just because someone they spoke to at a party started work 45 minutes after the alleged flu-filled offender was in the shop.
At the end of the day thousands of lives were probably shortened from the stress of it all. All because we have a silly app on our phones, busily telling us that someone who wasn’t even sick, was running about all over the country making other people not sick.
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