October 22 2021
New Zealand will move to a new "traffic light" system to manage Covid-19 when district health boards have 90 per cent of their eligible population vaccinated.
OPINION:
Day 66 of Auckland's sixth lockdown, and Aucklanders need some deliverance.
Today's announcement can't be D-Day because, after false starts such as last month's "road map", we're probably a few more letters down the alphabet by now.
Auckland and Waikato are still long overdue a circuit breaker.Here's what Jacinda Ardern needs to deliver today.
Admit obvious errors. The Prime Minister has never admitted an error in her career. This is understandable up to a point; she can't afford people to think what she says today might be just another error by tomorrow. But refusing to admit the blindingly obvious damages credibility even worse.
It's now obvious the Government was unprepared for a Delta outbreak.
Almost nothing was ready. At the beginning, the Government had to close vaccination centres because they hadn't planned around vaccinating people in an outbreak. Now with everything from school rules to vaccination targets, we can almost hear the Government thinking, "what on earth do we do next?"
The mistake was too much optimism. The Government thought vaccination would let us open up again, without suffering every other country's carnage.
Act leader David Seymour. Photo / Robert Kitchin, Pool
They didn't count on Delta. It broke through MIQ, and it can break through the vaccine. We now face fighting Covid at home with almost no preparation.
State obvious truths. More people will die from Covid-19 in New Zealand. Viruses have been killing humans for thousands of years. There is nothing the New Zealand Government, powerful as it may be, to stop that.
What's more, no Government anywhere is prepared to save lives at any cost. If ours was, we would not lose 400 people per year on the roads, 500 to the flu, 1600 to prostate cancer, 6000 to heart disease, and on it sadly goes.
Humans have other needs. This Government introduced "the world's first Wellbeing Budget". It is supposed to balance human needs instead of letting one cause, such as the economy, dominate all other needs.
Now Covid is trumping every other form of wellbeing. The well-recognised list including mental health, small business, education, and non-Covid healthcare needs to be dealt into consideration.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern during her post-Cabinet press conference on Monday. Photo / Mark Mitchell, Pool
Accepting imperfection and stating some obvious truths would not just restore declining public confidence in the Covid response. It would also be an excellent opportunity to switch up the response itself.
The entire reporting of the epidemic should shift from reporting cases to reporting Covid resilience. When our aim was zero cases, it made sense to focus on case numbers. Can we get them back to zero? Find out at 1pm tomorrow. That was then.
Now the Government has given up on contact tracing all cases. Nobody believes New Zealand can get back to zero, so the number of cases is just a snapshot of who showed up to get tested in the past few days.
Case numbers are not particularly relevant to our future any more. There will be many cases that are not tested, and many tested cases that have few serious symptoms. Now we know it's out, these numbers are meaningless.
What does matter is how prepared we are for Covid becoming endemic, as it now inevitably will. Resilience reporting would tell us daily, how many unvaccinated people in each region? How many hospital and ICU beds in each region? Would an outbreak overwhelm the available resources?
A triage tent for emergency admissions being set up at Middlemore Hospital this week. Photo / Michael Craig
How are other measures to slow spread and prevent serious hospitalisation going? What can be done today, to build resilience? Resilience reporting would put real pressure on the Government to get ready. It would focus the mind on when, not if, Covid gets out, as now seems inevitable.
After admitting imperfection, stating the grim reality we now face, and changing focus from the number of cases to Covid resilience, the Prime Minister could deliver what Auckland, and Waikato, really need.
We need a realistic timeframe for building resilience. When will it be possible to lift current restrictions on domestic activity, and at the border? When will our Covid resilience allow that to happen? What unexpected events could get in the way.
It's not good enough to just say "we'll do some thinking in that space". At this point, adults deserve to be told the truth.
If we come out of today with a clear plan that accepts some unavoidable truths about the Government's response to date, and what we face in the future, Act will be the first to congratulate the Prime Minister.
