Facing a Great Depression in our own time

One thing worries me about the decision to lighten the lockdown at midnight on Monday. It is this. What will the Government know on Monday that it did not know last Monday?

It worries me because in a crisis like this it seems vitally important decisions are made on solid grounds, not fear, sentiment or because it just “feels” right.

Before the Cabinet met last Monday Jacinda Ardern had publicly set out four public health criteria that needed to be satisfied for the Government to be confident it had Covid19 under control. These were to do with community transmission, testing and tracing, border control and health services. The last two were no longer a problem. The borders were tight and the health services were far from overwhelmed by the virus. Community transmission remained a problem only in the minds of those professors of epidemiology that have the Government’s ear.

They had been certain that if wider testing was done we would find it.

They still are, though by the time the Cabinet met on Monday Dr Ashley Bloomfield had the results of testing hundreds of asymptomatic people last weekend outside supermarkets in Queenstown, Canterbury, Waikato towns and Auckland, including South Auckland. The results: zero, zilch, not a single case. I thought that stunningly good news and I’m amazed it has not featured more strongly in public discussion this week.

But the professors urged yet more testing and they would prefer to have more weeks at Level 4. This time the Cabinet made its own decision.

The quality of testing and contacttracing appeared to be the only outstanding problem before the Cabinet met on Monday but it had an answer to deficiencies found in a rapid audit by Dr Ayesha Verrall. Though, it would take more than another week to reach “gold standard”, the Prime Minister has said that was not the reason the Cabinet decided to extend level 4.

So what was the reason? To “lock in the gains”, said the full page public notices, whatever “lock in” means. Logically it would mean Covid-19 case numbers continuing to decline, but when asked whether the decision to lift the lockdown could be reversed if there had been an increase in cases, Ardern has said no, emphatically.

Whatever happens, it seems we will be out of level 4 on Tuesday and that is such a relief if you are business that can work under level 3 restrictions or a grandparent permitted contact with the kids again, that it would be easy not to care how the decision was reached.

But if the pandemic has passed its peak, in Western countries at least, we are facing an economic, and therefore social, crisis on a scale unknown since the Great Depression. With that mind, the way the Government makes decisions matters very much indeed.

The more Ardern was questioned about the level 4 extension this week the more it seemed to be based simply on the Cabinet’s idea of a working week. A five-day extension through Anzac weekend would mean the loss of only two more working days, Thursday and Friday, she said.

That might be all it would mean for people who’ve never worked in the private sector. For shops and restaurants gearing for online sales and pick-ups, this long weekend would have been a good one for a relaunch.

Business considerations appear to have played little or no part in the Government’s response to the coronavirus from the beginning, except for relief measures. It was evident again this week when ministers faced Parliament’s Epidemic Response Committee to explain the extension.

When Simon Bridges asked the Minister for Small Business, Stuart Nash, what estimates he had taken to Cabinet of the effects on those people of another week at level 4, Nash eventually admitted he had no information of that kind.

But first he’d sought refuge in this canard that what’s best for public health is also best for business, Ardern’s “false dichotomy”. At least Nash avoided university words.

There are often conflicting national interests to consider in government, requiring invidious decisions, and response to Covid-19 was clearly one of them. The decision to go quickly to Level 4 restrictions may turn out to have been a good one if “elimination” of the virus is realistic. But we are only beginning to see the cost to the economy.

Ardern has redefined “elimination” to mean “no tolerance” of new cases, which means chasing the virus down with contact tracing and monitoring. That’s better than closing borders and suspending economic life.

Now her Government can turn its full attention to the economy it needs to revive for today’s working generations and their children. They need decisions made on information not instinct.