pn856. Our Covid Response. Buying time the right decision but often Late, Lackadaisically and Lucky

Tim Watkin, RNZ presenter, Pundit

UPDATE 

More than 160 schools, kura, and early childhood centres are managing identified Covid-19 cases in students or staff. Schools remain open under the Omicron strategy and a mandate requires children in Year 4 and above to wear face masks while indoors to reduce the spread of Covid-19. For children Year 3 and under, the Ministry of Health said mask wearing was encouraged, but not required.

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Extracts. 

Read the full article in Pundit.

Each variant has changed the game, but each time the government has chosen the same response. Buy time. It has frustrated some, but given the Prime Minister’s cautious nature is entirely in line with this government’s mojo. It’s cost jobs and businesses, but saved many more. And most of all it’s saved thousands and thousands of lives. It’s worked pretty dang well. 

That’s the good news. 

The bad news is that each time we’ve made the right decision to buy more time, we’ve made it late and with insufficient planning in place. The strategy has served us well, but the execution much less so. 

Government hesitancy or poor management have been as consistent as the ‘buy time’ tactic. The initial lockdown was a week or two late, the testing at the border got into gear weeks after it was meant to, security at MIQs was only sorted after a number of escapes, more ICU beds were only announced 22 months into the pandemic, and – crucially – the move to order the vaccine and rollout a programme was slow, for all its eventual effectiveness. And we’re paying the price for that slowness now, cutting the gap between second and third doses and less widely boosted than we could have been.

Time and again we’ve done the right thing, but late and lackadaisically. And time and again we’ve got lucky. Or, the rightness of the decision has bought us the time to play catch-up. That, for me, has been the defining story of our Covid response and our consistent ‘buy time’ tactics.

But now we face a new phase for New Zealand. Covid-19 has begun entering the community at a level we’ve never seen before. I give thanks to all that is holy that we have bought time and we are facing this now – informed, vaccinated, prepared, up against a less deadly variant – and not at any other time over the past two years, like so much of the rest of the world. All we have been through is so that now, as the wave hits, so many fewer of us will be washed away. For that reason alone (though there are many others, both in health and economic terms) we can be rightly proud of our Covid strategy thus far.

Critics have repeatedly – for the best part of two years – insisted that the government’s tactics have run their course and it needs to change. And they’re repeatedly been shown up. But now we truly are at the end of the ‘buy time’ era. We’ve bought all the time we could and the wave is upon us. Two years in and the government will need to pivot and take a new approach. Let’s hope their decision-making is as sound, but their execution improves. Because the thing about waves is that they keep on coming.

-- Tim Watkin