With roughly twice our population and more than 250 times as many deaths, do we really want to copy Sweden? Photo / Bloomberg
With roughly twice our population and more than 250 times as many deaths, do we really want to copy Sweden? Photo / Bloomberg
Opinion
COMMENT:
Two weeks ago in this column I asserted that fighting the Covid-19 pandemic was more like guerrilla warfare than crushing cars. The past fortnight has, if anything, confirmed that analogy. As with many other countries, apparent success has been followed by a further outbreak, though very much more limitedthan the initial onslaught. We need to be aware that these outbreaks can continue to recur even as we learn more lessons along the way to help overcome them.
One of the lessons from recent decades fighting guerrilla wars is that a central factor for success is winning the hearts and minds of the people. Losing them leads to a high risk of losing the war. The struggle for those hearts and minds now is less about convincing people Covid-19 is bad (though we do seem to have some in denial on this). It is more about persuading them to adhere to the necessary measures to prevent the disease spreading.
The understanding of what is required has changed over the past few months. Early on, the World Health Organisation and most local epidemiologists were not supportive of large-scale mask-wearing, something foreign to our culture unlike, say, Japan's or Taiwan's.
Now we are moving well down that track; the public seems readier to accept the message that it is one useful part of our defences.
But we have also had severe over-reaction in some quarters. The latest outbreak has been put down to systemic failure at the border. We do not even know exactly how transmission occurred. What we do know is that the system worked in placing a woman in managed isolation who had entered New Zealand and subsequently tested positive; somehow she (unwittingly) passed on the infection to a hotel maintenance worker. In the case of the South Auckland family cluster, there is also no substantive evidence to date of failure of the border system as far as checking people is concerned. The possibility of the virus coming in on freight of some sort raised a whole new set of control challenges which had not previously been considered.
On the basis of this lack of knowledge, media commentators and others managed to assert with certainty that all had been a "shambles". The headlines were so big that even Donald Trump managed to read them and assert it was all over for New Zealand. It was perhaps at this point that the hearts and sensible minds of New Zealanders began to realise that we had been wound up to a point that went well beyond the evidence.
Opposition parties had joined in the hunt with eagerness, only to back off a little in the past few days; presumably internal polling says they misjudged the general public mood.
National, meanwhile, had come out with a policy prescription which hit all the wrong buttons. Kiwis coming back to New Zealand would have to be pre-tested before departure. A quick analysis of the recent imported cases showed that would have had little or no effect. Inevitable border problems at the Auckland Supercity boundary would somehow be solved by locking down suburb by suburb. Not only would that create a much larger number of boundary problems, it was precisely the initial strategy that failed in the current Melbourne outbreak.
National also suggested moving in and out of shorter lockdowns, directly contrary to Treasury advice that this would be more disruptive for businesses and the economy. Finally, a major reorganisation of border control was proposed, which may have its merits, though it has been rejected on a number of occasions after much thought. But you would not want to be doing it in the midst of an outbreak, with all the complications such reorganisations always lead to.
Some people still think there are easier options out there. The most commonly mentioned is the Swedish model, for some reason mostly favoured by middle-aged males. But, with roughly twice our population, Sweden has had 50 times our number of cases and more than 250 times our number of deaths, while still having a substantial contraction in the economy. So far, their experiment with herd immunity seems to have failed. As for Trump's America, it has had an incidence rate, as a proportion of population, some 50 times ours and a death rate over 120 times ours.
When a full review is undertaken of how we dealt with the outbreak there will be many lessons to learn about how to do things better in the future. I would propose one right now: our Ministry of Health is woefully lacking a comprehensive operational, facilitation and support arm. The past fashion for separating policy from delivery has created many problems, which Covid-19 has served to highlight.
- Sir Michael Cullen is a former Labour MP, Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister.
