Seeking the less personal touch
The prospect of less up-close-and-personal diagnostic options needs to be pursued as sensible.
We are a country whose inhabitants tend to know a thing or two about issues of isolation and mobility. New Zealand was the last habitable place in the world of its size, or larger, that humans populated. We’re nowadays among the world’s great travellers because to get to most places requires so much travel.
Even as modern life becomes increasingly interconnected and mobile, in comparative terms we’re still on the outer reaches. One upside is that, in times of epidemic, it serves us well.
Many countries would find New Zealand’s situation, amid the spread of coronavirus, an enviable one. By no means are we protected but, as Health Minister David Clark says, we’ve had more time to plan and to assess our situation against established protocols.
The need to do so, and act swiftly on decisions, is particularly important not only in terms of the containment issues that are already in our face, but also in how we prepare to confront the prospect of the virus compounding the unavoidable seasonal winter influx of flu and viral conditions.
The prospect of less up-close-and-personal diagnostic options needs to be pursued as sensible. The Government has already spoken of a system being developed to work with some patients without them having to visit GPs personally. As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put it, ‘‘like a Portacom in a car park, for instance’’.
Dr Lance O’Sullivan continues to champion the idea of converted shipping containers as clinics sufficiently transportable to be moved to hotspots within 24 hours. They would have drive-through styled windows so people could get an assessment without leaving their car.
Consider, too, that preparatory work has been done to bring older doctors and nurses back into service should the need arise – and in the knowledge that these thoroughly welcome additions to the nation’s medical capacity would best be put to work in telephone or other slightly distanced services, because their age might put them in the category of the most personally vulnerable should they contract the virus themselves.
The extent to which all of this this might come at a cost of the personal touch is something most people will have little trouble accepting. These are times when safety, and efficiency, trump intimacy.
Already we seeing a retreat from many of life’s normal intimacies on personal levels, down to increasing disinclinations towards handshakes. This can hardly be treated as an impoliteness – although whoever fancied that the inelegance of an elbowbump could replace it was surely deluded. It has the indignity of the Birdie Dance.
Right now, societies where people are more reserved in their physical contacts with one another are at a cultural advantage.
Pioneering microbiologist Peter Piot, who helped discover Ebola and lead the fight against Aids, wasn’t being entirely jocular when he recently contrasted the slight standoffishness of the Brits with the vulnerabilities of, say, our friends in Brazil – ‘‘where greeting somebody can be like a total body search’’.
So here we find ourselves, in not so touchy-feely times where personal space is a little more of an issue than it was. And there’s a particular case to keep our distance, where it’s reasonably possible, from health professionals in particular.
Nobody should take it personally, but for that to happen might take a determined act of collective goodwill. Surely we’re up for that.