John Roughan: Naivety soon to be a thing of the past for NZ faced with rising Omicron

OPINION:

Naive is a word used in epidemiology for a population that presents virgin territory for a virus. We are a naive population, one of few left in the world. This is about to change.

Most of us are probably going to get intimately acquainted with the Omicron variant of Covid-19 for the first time in the pandemic. The Prime Minister once told us Delta had reached every part of Auckland but I didn't see any sign of Covid around me. I do now.

We haven't exactly invited Omicron to make us more worldly but we haven't resisted it the way we did previous versions. With cases rising past 5000 a day, the Government has lowered our defences a little more and continued its preparations to open the border.

We are about as ready as it is possible to be, 95 per cent of adults are vaccinated and getting boosted. But some of them may need to understand the vaccine is more like a contraceptive than a prophylactic. We can still get infected. Are we nervous?

Many of us must be. Auckland testing stations said they were overstretched this week because people with no cold or flu-like symptoms and who had no known contact with a confirmed case, were lining up for a test. The same thing happened at the beginning of Auckland's Delta outbreak last year.

It staggers me that so many people are prepared to sit in cars for many long hours, inching their way towards a distant tent for an unpleasant prod in their sinuses, just to be re-assured they haven't caught this virus.

Queue for Covid-19 testing at the Westgate testing centre in West Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig

Maybe it shouldn't surprise me considering the messaging New Zealand has been receiving for so long from some (not all) epidemiologists, public health officials, an extremely cautious Prime Minister and media that often sound more worried than she is.

Not all of us are nervous. While the "worried well" were lining up at testing sites this week, hundreds of other New Zealanders were continuing to occupy Parliament's grounds and surrounding streets bearing signs proclaiming, "Freedom not fear".

Jacinda Ardern, uncharacteristically, has tried to marginalise them and she seized on some unsavoury incidents in this third week of tension to try to discredit them but the protesters' fundamental fearlessness is widely shared as far as I can see.

Over the past two weeks, with Omicron case numbers doubling every few days, I have seen very few people wearing masks except when they enter a shop. I've seldom been asked to show my vaccine pass.

I have helped run a couple of social gatherings where we started out wearing masks but after a short time everybody had taken them off. Nobody did this angrily - or possibly even consciously. The damn things are stifling, making talking and hearing more difficult, people just take them off.

Lines of cars queued for testing from early morning, Devonport. Photo / Adam Pearse

As for vaccine passes, they are wrong in principle and it is hard to see what further purpose they serve. The protest at Parliament could depart with credit for changing the Prime Minister's tune on their future.

She acknowledged this week that people are "over" the virus now and we are - not in the petulant way we used to say we were over it, we have simply taken the phone off the hook. We are not talking about Covid, not reading about it, no longer sure whether we are in phases, stages or a traffic light and we can't remember what those let us do. We are getting on with life.

We may be naive or realistic, we'll know within another month or two. At long last, we are going to experience this pandemic, not just wonder what it is like.

For two years the Prime Minister has been telling us, "We can see what is happening overseas," but we couldn't. Very few of us have been overseas since the pandemic started. We have seen only news reports and it is not the same.

News seldom shows life outside its focus. A camera can make 20 people look like a crowd if they fill its frame. News is not the normality around the story. We notice this when an earthquake or volcanic eruption happens in New Zealand. Anxious friends overseas call asking, "Are you okay?" It's very hard to get a sense of perspective from afar.

Now, at last, we are going to find out what millions of people in other countries already know: how frightening this coronavirus is. We won't just talk about it, read about it, argue about whether we should fear it or live with it. It will be all around us and we'll see whether we needed to sacrifice so much freedom and pleasure when we were naive.