Health experts and NZ politicians right

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

There is a salutary lesson for us all in how our country and much of the world has responded to the coronavirus pandemic: that economies will be shut down to protect elderly and other vulnerable citizens from a highly-contagious disease that will kill many of them and overwhelm health systems.

The quick action of our politicians in implementing a lockdown straight after the first suspected cases of community transmission here also holds a salutary lesson for countries yet to have full-blown coronavirus outbreaks — that along with ramped-up testing and contact-tracing, this appears to be effective in stopping Covid-19 in its tracks. There is a good chance now that we are not just flattening the curve like other nations are aiming for with their lockdowns, but rather squashing it.

Our columnist today is likely to be right in his prediction that there will be fewer deaths in New Zealand than in an average year, while completely ignoring the fact this is principally because of the lockdown measures he thinks are overblown (along with the wider public health benefits of our new hand hygiene practices, cough and sneeze etiquette, and social distancing).

Without the lockdown we would now be well under way in climbing the exponential growth curve for Covid-19 cases and fatalities that we have seen in other countries.

The coronavirus would no doubt be in the Tairawhiti now as well, starting to make its way through our vulnerable communities.

Mr Bauld's previously-raised idea of just protecting the elderly (no mention of the many others who are vulnerable because of pre-existing health conditions, but no doubt they would get protective gear too) belies how contagious this virus is and how human nature would ensure any such protections fail against rampant coronavirus in our communities.

A different track New Zealand could potentially have chosen is the East Asian model of extensive testing and rapid contact-tracing to beat back outbreaks of the virus. That is where we are headed now, but we could not implement it earlier as we are only just starting to have the testing capacity to achieve it.

Our health system and people were less pandemic-prepared than nations such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore that managed to defeat the Sars coronavirus epidemic 17 years ago. We also had tens of thousands of Kiwis arriving back from areas of the globe that included coronavirus hotspots.

New Zealand locked down just in time; a salutary lesson indeed.