Covid sneaks back among us
Anew strain of Covid-19 has slipped out of a managed isolation facility and into Northland which, as a result, has never felt closer to Southland. Any way you look at it, this was an abject screwup of border protection imperatives. How bad and how damaging are two different questions.
It was alarmingly bad but, all going well, it may not prove too damaging, given that the unfortunate carrier was at least more diligent in tracking her movements than she was identifying and reporting the earliest stages of her worsening symptoms.
If we all emerge OK it will be no thanks to what should have been the rigours of our border protection regime, nor to the broader conduct of New Zealanders who have been showing a slump in our collective standard of vigilance.
As recently as New Year we were the envy of the world, with large and happy gatherings safely conducted while so many countries looked up from their own huddled, scared and near-exhausted miseries to wish for what we had.
But it was all imperilled when the Northland woman returning to New Zealand contracted the infection from another returnee while they were in managed isolation in Auckland’s Pullman Hotel, leaving before she became symptomatic.
As yet we simply don’t know how she got it. It could have been a respiratory droplet, or from a surface, and there’s particular suspicion about the ventilation system. All of which, we have long been assured, are previously identified potential problems ardently guarded against.
When the cause is found (are we entitled to say ‘‘when’’?) the correction needs to be swift, emphatic, and as precise or as widespread as circumstances demand. That wider perspective is particularly important given the warning of experts like Otago University’s Amanda Kvalsvig, who would have us dial back our expectations of the rate we can allow returnees into the country, and dial up the isolation standards to be required before they board inbound flights.
Requiring a five-day pre-flight hotel quarantine with at leasts two tests prior to arrival would undeniably cause further hardship for people outside our borders who have already been doing it tough. But judged by the standards of the greatest good for the greatest number, an increasingly compelling case can be made to be that steely in our requirements.
As well, the Government is rightly reassessing what, disturbingly, appears to have been a prematurely easy-osey approach to returnees’ movements within our own isolation facilities towards the end of their stay – after the final testing but before their release. That’s a stage where ‘‘nearly there’’ status must be used to encourage stamina and a maintenance of protective standards. Not as a reason to let them slip.
Remember New Year? We were the envy of the world. We’ve relaxed. Certainly in the south, where the Southern District Health Board wrote to business owners urging them to help get customers scanning tracer app QR codes because practices were getting slack. Anyone who disputes that cannot have been paying attention.
So our authorities, and the rest of us, need to reconsider our standards of vigilance. It’s like a fresh Facebook post from one Invercargill shop puts it: ‘‘Righto peps, it’s time to up your game . . . We all have vulnerable loved ones in our lives, so let’s be above this Covid and stamp it out.’’
‘‘If we all emerge OK it will be no thanks to what should have been the rigours of our border protection regime . . .’’