Learning to live with Covid
Aucklanders will wake up this morning having lived through New Zealand’s shortest Covid-19 lockdown.
Just three days long and with alert level 3 restrictions allowing comforts like takeaway food and coffee, Auckland’s brief confinement ranks as one of the shortest and least onerous Covid lockdowns anywhere in the world.
Auckland was to move to alert level 2 at midnight last night, with the rest of the country moving to alert level 1.
The question for New Zealanders is whether Cabinet’s decision yesterday represents a new, more confident and possibly more cavalier evolution of New Zealand’s
Covid-19 response, which one economist and modeller described says is now the ‘‘Ferrari’’ of international Covid plans.
Around Parliament earlier yesterday there was a belief that the Government’s approach, described by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern as an ‘‘abundance of caution,’’ would cause the lockdown to be extended for another few days.
This was certainly the case when a further two new cases were announced in a select committee at noon.
But the mood changed just before 2pm, when a confident
Covid-19 minister Chris Hipkins made his way through a socially distanced media scrum on his way to the debating chamber.
A far cry from the ashen faced man he was announcing new cases on Sunday, Hipkins made the point that the two new cases had clear link to the current cluster, a cause for optimism.
Ardern characteristically took the middle way when asked if the decision to end Auckland’s lockdown meant she felt more confident dealing with Covid-19.
‘‘I will never be comfortable with Covid-19,’’ Ardern said. ‘‘But you do learn things, undoubtedly you learn things.’’
Some of the things the Government has learned came off the back of previous mistakes. Since September, ministers have been working to Heather SimpsonBrian Roache’s report into issues at the border. Those changes have probably resulted in fewer incursions.
However, as National Party
Covid-19 spokesperson Chris Bishop pointed out in the House this week, the most likely chains of transmission for the current Auckland case relate to issues that Simpson and Roache identified and which should have been fixed by now.
The report referenced problems around scheduling the testing of some border workers – an issue in the current case who should have been tested on February 1 but was not; it also noted that there were concerns even then about how dirty and clean laundry was separated and cleaned – a possible vector of transmission in this case.
That is somewhat embarrassing for the Government, but that embarrassment is balanced out by the fact their Covid response is now so secure that its only way into the country is apparently on dirty bedsheets.
Economist and modeller Rodney Jones said the decision showed confidence that the Government’s ‘‘toolkit’’ was good enough to contain MIQ leakages.
‘‘We have a Ferrari in our system in terms of chasing down these clusters,’’ he said.
Jones is also optimistic that despite new, highly transmissible Covid variants popping up, New Zealand’s risk of further outbreaks was reducing as the world got over the peak of infections thanks to the international vaccination campaign.
‘‘We can see case numbers globally on a daily basis and we can track the path of the virus – right now despite these variants we’re past the peak of the pandemic,’’ he said, saying the peak was around New Year.
Auckland drops to alert level 2
Rest of the country back in level 1
NZ’s response the ‘‘Ferrari’’ of Covid plans