New Zealanders, increasingly shell-shocked by the way Covid-19 has taken over our lives, are looking for some positive news from the government. More of the same will no longer work.
Opinion: I am not one for New Year's resolutions – they seem pointless and exaggerated to me. If you want to do something new or make a change in your life, you do not need the prop of a New Year's resolution to do so.
Nevertheless, I allowed myself the faint hope at the end of 2021 that we would be talking about something other than Covid19 in 2022. But it quickly became clear that was a forlorn hope. Most holiday conversations still ended up being about Covid19, one way or another, even if they did not start out that way.
Perhaps that should be no surprise, however depressing it might be. Sadly, as we look towards the pandemic entering its third year, in New Zealand we are still overly focused on it, and collectively afraid of what it might do next. So much so that our national confidence is suffering.
Even with more relaxed circumstances under the traffic light system, there has still seemed to be a national reluctance to try and get back to normal, as the smaller numbers of people moving about and visiting our holiday centres has shown.
We are little over a couple of weeks into 2022, but already it looks likely to be another long, grim year, dominated by Covid19 and its variants, and more importantly our response to them.
The arrival of Omicron seems set to squash any optimism at the end of last year that we were on the verge of a return to a form of normality. The Prime Minister's opening media conference declaration that the spectre of Omicron changed things and that the government would be "sharing its thinking" (in other words telling us what to do once more) over the next few weeks sounded all so familiar and depressing.
Similarly, too, the calls from Professor Michael Baker for a return to some form of stronger alert level, echoed by Dr Bloomfield’s comments that the traffic lights system might need to be strengthened to deal with Omicron, are just repeating the same old responses, even though the virus is changing.
The Prime Minister was not telling us anything we had not already worked out for ourselves from watching events unfold around the world in the last few weeks when she said the arrival of Omicron here was a matter of "when" not "if". Rather than statements of the obvious we needed and deserved to know the detailed response plan.
Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we have been told constantly officials are planning for all eventualities, but the lack of detail about how Omicron will be handled, as with Delta before it, suggests otherwise. And, as members of the “team of five million”, the rest of us have a right to know the details of what is planned – now – not to just be soothingly told that the government will be “sharing its thinking” with us (once it has finessed its spin?) over coming weeks.
The reluctance to let the public in on its thinking as it is developing, to engage in public debate and test ideas, to challenge the views of the favoured experts with the views of other experts, here and abroad, has been a sad hallmark of the government’s approach throughout the pandemic.
This prevailing mood of secrecy, dressed up as an “abundance of caution” has been a major contributor to the uncertainty and fear that has gripped the community, and frustrated businesses and cost jobs over the last two years. The Prime Minister’s comments so far this year suggest this approach is set to continue.
The only positive suggestion in the last two years has been that of vaccination, but that is running out of time. We were told originally that two doses of Pfizer would be the best protection the community could have against Covid19 and its variants.
Now, when we have achieved well over 90 percent double vaccination, a goal seen as unrealistic just a few months ago, we are being urged to get a third booster shot to fight Omicron. Already, it is estimated that more than 80 percent of those able to will have done so by the end of February, and that figure will almost certainly accelerate well before then.
But what happens then? When more than 90 percent of the population is triple vaxed, what other positive inducements remain at the government’s disposal? Will it then move to begin reducing some of the restrictions it has imposed, or will we be then told this is just one more step along the way towards goalposts that remain ever elusive and shifting further away than ever before?
The point that arises from all this, fuelled by the government’s unwillingness to be completely open with us all and the steadily negative and therefore unrealistic utterances from its public health advisers, is that our whole approach looks more and more like putting a finger in the dyke every time a crack appears, rather than working out how to live with the problem.
While that approach was understandable, even justifiable, in the early days of the pandemic, when knowledge and science were developing, it is no longer the case. It is unrealistic for New Zealand to expect that it can suppress the virus here in a way that no other country has been able to do, unless of course the intention is we really do become the hermit kingdom some have feared.
In other countries where Omicron has broken out, a couple of conclusions are already obvious.
While Omicron spreads more rapidly than any variant discovered so far, as a throat-based infection it is less damaging or life-threatening for the overwhelming majority. And the waves of infection appear to pass more rapidly, meaning that countries reporting record levels of infection (South Africa and even Britain, for example) just a few weeks ago are now saying their peak has passed.
New Zealand needs to be heeding these lessons and preparing for a short, sharp invasion now that Omicron is here, rather than a reversion to the intrusive controls and restrictions the health advisers appear to be looking to fall back upon to impossibly keep it out.
Beyond that of course is a deeper issue. As the third year of the pandemic approaches, the question arises of how much longer public tolerance for essentially reactive responses to every new variant which emerges, will continue.
Already we are seeing wide-scale protests in European countries against measures like vaccine passes, or wilful breaching of restrictions from the top down in the case of Britain, and we should not expect our public to remain indefinitely as docile as it has been over the last couple of years. This is not to excuse or justify the behaviour at the other end of the scale – the activities of Mr Tamaki and his acolytes are simply irresponsible – but to make the point that the patience and tolerance of mainstream, often uncomplaining New Zealanders, unable to visit or see family and relatives from overseas, or worried about their jobs and the general state of their communities has been stretched beyond a reasonable level over the last two years.
Recently, the core tenets of our approach so far have been challenged as never before. Last week, the World Health Organization, on whose advice the government and its advisers have previously drawn so heavily, strongly criticised continuing reliance on border controls and national lockdowns as unrealistic.
Yet the Government’s (and most of the New Zealand media’s) response was to ignore the comments completely, while Professor Baker’s defiant defence of our border control system was predictable.
Only at the weekend did Covid-19 Response Minister Hipkins concede in a refreshingly open interview that our current border settings were “unsustainable” and needed to change. But a few hours later, the country was put back into the traffic lights red.
Since 2020, New Zealanders have invested a huge amount of trust in the government and its advisers to do the right thing by them, to keep them safe. They have put up with lockdowns and restrictions, albeit increasingly grudgingly as time has passed, and responded remarkably when finally given the opportunity to be vaccinated.
To maintain that commitment, what they need, indeed deserve, now is a positive pathway forward, not the threat of more restrictions as new variants loom.
So, when the Prime Minister does “share” the government’s full thinking with the rest of us, she will need to focus on a few basic points for us to take it seriously. For example, how quickly will New Zealand rejoin the rest of the world, and learn to live with Omicron and other variants, rather than continuing to delude itself that it can defeat Covid-19 like a modern-day King Canute and succeed where everyone else has not?
Also, when will the inefficient, unfair and cumbersome state detention system we euphemistically call MIQ be abolished in favour of trusting people to self-monitor and self-isolate if necessary? And when, like other countries, will we follow the World Health Organization’s advice and open our borders to fully vaccinated and tested Covid-19-free inwards and outwards travellers?
New Zealanders, increasingly shell-shocked by the way Covid19 has taken over our lives, are looking for some positive news from the government. More of the same will no longer work the way it has done so far. Nor will reminding New Zealanders how lucky we have been to have now enjoyed two consecutive Covid-19-free summer holiday periods, as though that justifies all the other restrictions imposed.
With an election looming in just over eighteen months’ time, the government needs to set out much clearer markers so business and the wider community can plan their futures, not just for the summer holidays but for the years ahead.
