Covid 19 coronavirus: Jacinda Ardern's consistent, safe approach - with wriggle room

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Photo / Mark Mitchell

COMMENT:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern must be getting familiar with this playbook, which shows a consistency to her D-Day approach: cautious, but with wriggle room.

Imposing full lockdown in Auckland would be the most certain way to snuff out all chains of transmission, but public buy-in would have been feeble given the small size of the cluster and the economic carnage that would have ensued.

It's also hardly surprising that she couldn't be confident enough to lift lockdown lite on the back of 30,000 test results.

That would have left too much to chance, given the possibility that new clusters could still emerge.

This is despite the positive signs that the outbreak appears to be small, confined to Auckland, and with few links to travel around the country or to indoor gatherings.

Reviewing settings in one week while prepping the country for 12 days at the current alert level settings is exactly the playbook she employed when the country waited to move from level 2 to level 1.

Back then, even director general of health Ashley Bloomfield agreed with easing restrictions early on the back of good results from daily testing.

A best-case scenario now - and the easing of restrictions sooner - is for mass testing to show few new cases, all of them in Auckland and connected to the existing cluster, and to find the source of infection so that containing all of the outbreak can be more confidently achieved.

A worst-case scenario - dozens of new clusters spreading not just in Auckland, but all over the country - seems less likely now than it was before the test results since Tuesday.

Ardern could have also chosen to move one of the regions visited by people in the cluster into lockdown lite.

But it would have gone down like a brick through the window if she had imposed level 3 on a city because of a short fuel stop.

As well as combating this outbreak, the challenge for the Government is to learn lessons by ensuring its processes are solid and are being followed.

Thankfully the Government changed its mind on masks in time for the public to get used to the idea before this outbreak.

It is also now requiring all businesses to carry QR codes to enhance contact-tracing. It would have been a stronger "go hard, go early" response if that had been in place earlier.

And the ongoing use of pop-up centres to ensure testing numbers remain at the level the Government wants - 4000 a day - should be considered. Higher testing numbers throughout July and the first week of August may have detected this outbreak sooner.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and director general of health Ashley Bloomfield. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Despite regular testing of asymptomatic border workers being part of the Government's testing strategy at the end of June, it hasn't happened.

It's very possible for someone without symptoms to have and be spreading Covid-19, but yesterday Health Minister Chris Hipkins said mandatory testing was a "big lever to pull".

But the practice before this outbreak - daily health checks of workers and a test if symptomatic - meant that some of them weren't being tested at all.

If that continues, it would be leaving too much to chance.