The ill-chosen ‘whew!’

Should you find yourself in a horror film, there are rules. Don’t stand near that darkened window. Don’t open that door to find out what’s scratching on the other side. If you’re fleeing a monster you must expect to trip over at least twice. And above all, whatever you do, don’t heave a sigh of relief.

To do so invokes disaster more reliably than reading aloud from an ancient book of spells; more speedily than peering over a crazed villain’s body to make sure he’s dead.

We’re not in a horror film. But to prevent Covid19 becoming one, this is no time to be sighing with relief.

Absolutely, we’re entitled to feel encouraged by signs the lockdown may be working pretty well. But we’re not out of the viral woods. In fact, even heartening news like this presents a fresh challenge to our collective self-discipline.

The more things track well, the more our dread of the disease retreats, the more vivid the costs become and the more impatient we are to be sprung from our cages impelled by the feeling that surely we’ve done enough.

Feelings aren’t facts. To get the facts needed to justify lockdown’s end will require more testing, more information, and more time.

Which means patience. Which is tough. All the more so because, perversely, we’re in a situation where success is less conspicuously appreciable than failure.

The closest most of us will have knowingly come to the virus might be to know someone who caught it but has emerged OK. As nationwide victories go, that one might feel a tad anticlimactic, or even spuriously be used to argue in hindsight that the lockdown was unnecessary to begin with.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is entitled to raise as good news that we reached 1000 infections when it was projected we’d have 4000 by this stage. Inevitably some will quite wrongly take this as meaning nothing more than that the projection was a fanciful one to begin with. If we buy that, which we shouldn’t, a deserved sense of achievement evaporates.

All going well, and accepting that the ground could still change underneath us, the most important benefits of the lockdown will continue to be the non-events. The bad things not happening. The cases of death and disease that we don’t have.

Ardern’s message that a good health outcome is essential to a good economic one is valid, but as impatience grows and stamina is tested, pressures that would end the lockdown prematurely are sure to mount.

So will cautionary examples from overseas to help keep us honest. For the worst of reasons, countries such as the United States in particular will continue to set morbid examples of the consequences of wilfully or negligently failing to react to the dangers of Covid-19.

Meanwhile, the need for New Zealand to hold its nerve doesn’t mean there’s no room to budge. The National Party’s call for more businesses to be allowed to open up if they can prove they can operate safely does have immediate appeal, but the key word is proof, as distinct from hastily assessed plausibility.

In cases where the standard can be met – and where resources permit proper scrutiny on that point – then we mustn’t make this time any harder than it needs to be.

Perversely, we’re in a situation where success is less conspicuously appreciable than failure.