Our level best won day, now we recover

Take a deep breath, New Zealand. Hold your chins up and allow your chests to swell. You have stared down a pandemic with the sort of stoicism for which past generations have been acclaimed. There were few illusions about the effort required to break the chain of Covid-19 coronavirus transmissions. When Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on March 14 “we must go hard and we must go early”, there were few dissenters. Many, in fact, were calling for harder and faster measures.

The overriding message during the level 4 lockdown was to stop. Stop shopping for nonessentials, stop contact with anyone outside your immediate household or essential work, stop the virus from transferring around communities.

Despite easing restrictions over subsequent levels 3 and 2, it will be difficult for some to now heed the call to go. Go and support local businesses, go on a domestic holiday to support regional tourism and communities. Go about your life again.

At alert level 1, we can return without restrictions to work, school, sports and domestic travel, and get together with as many people as we want.

Controls at the borders remain, including health screening and testing for all arrivals, and mandatory 14-day managed quarantine or isolation.

As we unite to recover from the effects of Covid19, it’s still important to keep the basic hygiene measures, including washing hands and coughing or sneezing into an elbow.

We should all continue to keep track of where we’ve been and who we’ve seen, to assist with rapid contact tracing. Businesses must help customers keep track of where they’ve been by displaying the NZ Covid Tracer QR code poster. Ardern has warned there will be more cases in New Zealand, and this is a heightened risk with eventual reopening of borders.

Under level 1, our fate lies in our ability to quickly trace any further cases. There can be no concerted recovery if we are forced into lockdown levels to try again to stop the virus leaping from host to host. That we remain at an alert level, albeit the lowest, is an indication of the caution required.

However, we must acknowledge what lies ahead. Australian PM Scott Morrison has described the pandemic as a “dual crisis” on health and economic fronts — with the two working against each other.

The economic crisis has only just begun as the 12-week wage subsidy ends and recession bites. The Government’s advisory website reflected this in changing the URL overnight on Monday from covid. govt.nz to uniteforrecovery.govt.nz.

In announcing no new cases for the 18th day in a row yesterday, director general of health Ashley Bloomfield also acknowledged other pains to come, including mental and physical wellbeing through missing out on care and the impact of the economic crisis on mental wellbeing.

Having vanquished the virus crisis we have taken our first step; recovery is now the challenge and must become the focus.

Now is the hour for five million New Zealanders to shine.