‘Let’s f inish what we started’
One more week of cooking every meal, of seeing the same couple of blocks on your daily walk, of seeing just the people you live with.
The Government decided yesterday that despite singledigit new case numbers and no evidence of undetected widespread transmission of the novel coronavirus, New Zealand needs an extra five days of full lockdown to cement the gains made over the last month.
Instead of leaving lockdown tomorrow night, we will do it after the Anzac weekend at 11.59pm on Monday, April 27.
Then there will be two weeks of level three, itself nowhere near a return to normal life. Nobody will be throwing parties or heading to the bar but many will be heading into work for the first time in weeks, or dropping their kids off at school again.
Restrictions on recreation, travel, and social life will be loosened but remain strict: You can surf but not jetski, travel home but not to your holiday home, and add a small exclusive bubble to your own – not a Tinder date, probably.
It’s lockdown-lite, lockdown with a bit more trust for you to be sensible.
As Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said: ‘‘Let’s finish what we started.’’ She would have been conscious that many Kiwis see level three as basically level four with takeaways so they would not have been pleased with another whole month of it.
Two weeks gives the Government one more disease transmission cycle to make sure it has locked in the gains achieved during the lockdown.
Those gains are obvious. The transmission rate of the virus in New Zealand is now estimated to be just 0.48 – meaning, roughly, that only every second person who catches it passes it on to someone else. Keep it there and the virus dies out by itself. Of the more than 700 cases in New Zealand diagnosed this month, only eight are a real mystery, with a transmission pathway not yet explained.
But while the lockdown is clearly working, it’s not yet clear that the health system is ready for the pressure that could come from moving out of it.
Contact tracing – that is, tracking every single person an infected case may have infected themselves, and then isolating them – appears to be a part of the problem. An independent audit completed 10 days ago but released yesterday was fairly damning. New Zealand’s contact tracing capacity was exceeded at points in March, even when there were fewer than 100 new cases a day. And it wasn’t yet clear if the new nationalised hub for this work would be up for it.
This report is now most likely out of date, with the Government ploughing $55 million into upgrading the national hub and director-general of health Dr
Ashley Bloomfield promising that we will have ‘‘goldstandard’’ contact tracing by the end of this week. There are good grounds to critique the Government for only getting this work done now but as with the nationalisation of personal protective equipment (PPE), it was moving from a standing start.
New Zealand’s highly decentralised healthcare system is simply not well placed for nationalised epidemics of this nature, and as David Skegg told the Epidemic Response Committee recently, it’s those long-maligned bureaucrats in Wellington who need the funding and support to get it ready for the next one.
This extension was couched in business terms by Ardern, because she knows it will be businesses who are the most angry with an extension – polling suggests the general public supports big restrictions.
Ardern noted it was just two extra business days of lockdown compared with a Wednesday exit. And if you are going back to work next week – as sectors like construction and manufacturing will be – you can go in to get the workplace set up this week.
This short extension is probably the right call. Health experts might recommend a longer lockdown in an ideal
world but they are advisers, not leaders. Your social licence starts to bleed away the longer you keep people on house arrest.
It is right for the Government to consider the damage to the economy when the risk starts to get lower, as NZ First has clearly been pushing for within Cabinet. The economy should not be a sacred cow, and can be reconfigured in time so that the damage from crises like these don’t hit the working poor the hardest but that won’t happen overnight. For now, there are tens of thousands of Kiwis who don’t have jobs they can do on laptops but who deserve the security of employment.
At the same time, those who cry over-reaction and want the lockdown to be shortened need only look to the city at the centre of the world’s economy for evidence of this disease’s power. Nearly 14,000 people have now died from the virus in New York. No government would find it tenable to keep the entire economy open with that kind of death toll.