Category: Covid Rants

Last year October (2020) I remember having a discussion with work colleagues about how surreal it was that the rest of the world was battling Covid and here in NZ we were living in freedom. It seemed like we were on a different planet. And I think we were.

Credit does deserve to be given to the government of the day for managing Covid in early 2020 and achieving elimination. Everyone will agree that elimination was necessary so that as a country we could prepare ourselves for the pandemic.

But that’s where elimination should have ended.

It was a strategy that gave us time and space to think long-term and be prepared for the inevitable – that Covid was here to stay. It gave us time to have a proper roadmap. To look at what was happening in other countries and learn from their mistakes. Use these learnings and prepare the whole nation for vaccinations and learning to live with Covid.

Pull resources together and prepare for more ICU beds and specially trained medical personnel. Take Covid plus variants head-on. Something the rest of the world was not able to do. And achieve gold standard this way.

Personally, after the second lockdown in 2020, my view quickly turned to that – Covid was not going to get eliminated in the world, let alone in NZ. And to continue burying our heads in the sand and living in our freedoms were, while enjoyable, very short-term outlooks.

Covid was always lurking around the corner.

What was required back in October 2020 was not a focus on how well we have done with managing Covid but a focus on how well we can do with Covid in the future. We all however tend to live in the present.

While we were busy with ourselves, the rest of the world was getting on with Covid. They dealt with deaths, they dealt with overwhelmed hospital systems. Even dealt with being called morons by us. But, well, here we are. We wasted away precious time.

Some will say that we were ready for long-term Covid. I argue not. Elimination created a false sense of security, for which we are now paying the price. Here’s why.

Complacent

According to information released by the government, our nation’s leaders started preparing for the Delta outbreak in late July 2021. https://www.newsroom.co.nz/documents-reveal-real-lack-of-preparedness-for-delta

Delta was creating chaos around the world, and so close to home – Fiji, April 2020. This was when we had also bubbled with Australia, where Delta had already arrived. Elimination taught us all – leaders and followers- to become complacent.

On one busy Saturday afternoon, the ferry captain announced that masks were mandatory for all passengers, but over 50% were onboard without a mask. When my husband kicked up a fuss with the ferry staff, he was told that the transport operators were not allowed to refuse mask-less passengers onboard. And it seemed like very little people cared that they had no masks on. Complacent? Or simply did not care.

This was the reality for most Kiwis. Why contact trace, why wear masks, when we have no Covid to deal with?

Reactive

Now, with Auckland still in lockdown, it seems that the government is still operating in a reactionary mode. Please don’t take my word for this though. I quote from a government released document, which was a review of government’s Covid response in 2020 –https://covid19.govt.nz/assets/resources/22-Mar-21-Proactive-Release/Second-rapid-review-of-the-COVID-19-all-of-goverment-response.pdf

“The reactive space in which the response has so far existed has meant that these governance structures have remained at the “tactical” or “issues-management” level, rather than being able to set strategic or future-focussed agendas for the response.” Page 12

“Interviewees acknowledged, however, that the system has been largely in reactive mode. We heard there is a real desire to shift to a more strategic and longer-term way of thinking and operating; to get ahead of issues rather than constantly reacting to events as they emerge…Across our interviews, there was an emerging consensus that COVID-19 will be the dominant challenge facing New Zealand (and the world) for at least the next 18-24 months.” Page 11

This report is dated October 2020. A year ago. The reviewers clearly stated that Covid was a challenge for the next two years. Yet sadly, we are making up things as we go in this outbreak. Why think of a future with Covid in it, when it has been eliminated?

Vaccination

Some blame Pfizer for delaying the vaccine delivery. I have no facts here. To date, the vaccine procurement process and contract details have not been made public. We have no factual data, either way, to substantiate any claims because sadly, there is no transparency on this issue.

However, a government media release in January 2021 claimed that our vaccination programme will be the “biggest ever” – https://covid19.govt.nz/alert-levels-and-updates/latest-updates/covid-19-vaccine-slated-for-possible-approval-next-week/ It also stated that “We hope [emphasis added – they did not say plan] to start vaccinating the wider population mid-year.” Delta arrived in August 2021. At that point, or even before that point, there was no “Super Saturday”, no free sausage sizzles, no seats in business class, etc. to get people vaxxed.

We did well with Super Saturday. It was a great idea. But this type of hype to get vaccinated, when we had time on our side, could have started from January 2021? By now, 10 months in the making, we would be at the desired goal of 90% vaxxed. And our much-coveted gold standard.

But, we are again chasing our tails. With Aucklanders paying the brutal price of a complacent, reactive, irresponsible government. The hype started only when Delta arrived. Why? Elimination. Because we had no Covid. There was no rush to vaccinate the masses.

Irresponsible

At a time when the government had a real leadership role to play, it chose the path of self-adulation. It wanted to prove to the rest of the world that they were better than the rest. Elimination and a Covid free NZ were messages the government held on to for 18 months. While other governments were working hard to promote vaccination.

It is irresponsible to expect the nation to change its mind as quickly as the government has (abandoned elimination in a day)? Change does not happen overnight.

I have heard about people in the country who still think they can remain unvaccinated because they have lived without Covid since May 2020. Elimination created this false sense of security.

To date, not one government personnel has admitted that they were lax in preparing for Delta. Not one person has said sorry to Aucklanders, for not moving MIQ facilities out of this city.

Rather, the arrogance carries on. Another milestone for NZ to achieve – be the world leader by being the most vaxxed. What does being a world leader mean to an Aucklander who gets out of level 2.75 into a vague traffic light system?

We are now paying the heavy price for putting all our eggs in the Elimination basket. It worked well, yes, but only for the short term. Even in the face of Delta in August 2021, we brought out our Elimination basket. While the rest of the world was and is looking ahead, to endemicity.

Now would be a good time to prepare the nation for what lies ahead, in the longer term. But, we are messing around with alert levels and traffic light systems. Again, very short-sighted. How very responsible!

Notes:

Please see sources for endemicity and scientific/medical data on living with Covid: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8461290/;

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/features/what-will-it-be-like-when-covid-19-becomes-endemic/;

https://sgmatters.com/whats-the-journey-towards-endemicity-like-is-the-taskforce-flip-flopping/

https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(21)02186-3.pdf

PS: One may say that this virus caught the world by surprise, and our government was dealing with it in a reactionary manner, like the rest of the world. I beg to differ on the simple point that, yes, we had no blueprint, but we had the benefit of time, and our geographic isolation.

We were living in freedoms that were not available for the rest of the world for most of last year and early 2021. During this time, we could have used the available science, data from the rest of the world, their experiences, etc. to prepare for the inevitable. I do agree that last year we did well. But we lost focus. And sadly, we are none the wiser still.

One might also argue that all this commentary is beneficial in hindsight. I argue that last year, in August 2020, I was one of the few people who was calling Elimination out, who was calling out the lack of long-term thinking. And I am an ordinary individual. I am not a civil servant. If I have the capability to think ahead, why are our government ministers exempt from this ability? Do we not vote them into power to do such thinking for us?

They have the resources to do long-term forecasts, to get the best in the country to do this type of work for them, they have the resources to tap into WHO and other scientific data, to talk to other world leaders and analyse what has worked and what has not over the last 18 months. The fact that they did not make use of these resources does not make me a bad person for calling it out.

“All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home…I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere.” – An unnamed refugee father speaking to his sleeping son in Khaled Hosseini’s Sea Prayer

Refugees are people who flee not just from war and armed conflict, they flee from all types of injustices, including gender-based crimes and crimes against children. They try to escape from countries where natural disasters devastate their lives and livelihoods, from countries where having an opinion against a dominant culture, group or government is punished. And they face/survive far more atrocious things than Covid.

The vast majority of the world’s refugees end up in what is commonly known as the ‘developing countries’. There were 30 million refugees and asylum seekers globally at the end of 2019 and less than 1% were resettled in First world countries last year. NZ promised to resettle 1500 refugees annually from 2020. Last year we promised an intake of 1000 refugees but resettled only 800. This year, we had one intake of roughly 100 people (without making up for last year’s shortfall of 200). And then Covid happened. The resettlement programme got suspended, along with the hopes, dreams and plans of the remaining 1400 people looking forward to rebuilding their lives here.

Refugees survive in camps, in slums in developing counties, on food handouts and rations, with limited access to water, medicine, education, resorting to all sorts of ‘work’. They already battle malnutrition, malaria, respiratory diseases, measles…The threats to life they encounter are far too many to note down on this single page. Now, they too, live alongside Covid. I would like to believe that we inhabit a just world, but refugees remain in places where they are susceptible to Covid as well, while we live in our national cocoon.

The UNHCR and International Organisation for Migration suspended all refugee resettlement programmes in March 2020 but uplifted the suspension in June 2020. At that point in time NZ was revelling in Covid-free joy. Yet, we did not resume the refugee resettlement programme. We are by far one of the best countries in the world in terms of dealing with Covid. But apparently we do not have the confidence in our health care and testing systems to bring in a very small percentage of one of the world’s most vulnerable at a time when they need us the most…when the same systems function for the 400-odd people who arrive daily at our borders. Refugees do not need hotels for managed quarantine. The Mangere Resettlement Centre has functioned for years as THE place where new refugees go when they arrive, and where they remain for 6 weeks, isolated from the rest of NZ (even during pre-Covid times), while they learn about life in NZ. The infrastructure is in place. The Covid tagline “We are in this together” appears to apply to New Zealanders only. I thought as a country we were more inclusive than that.

Perhaps only our First World lives are more important…

Yes, there is a global crisis that is Covid. Yes, there have been 28.4 million cases of Covid worldwide, and yes, of these 19.4 million have so far recovered. The count of 30 million refugees and asylum seekers keeps increasing. We do not know how many die, unnamed and unaccounted for, each day. Which is, and has been, the bigger crisis? Where is our humanitarian spirit, our humanity?

On the topic of life and death…the perilous sea crossing in Hosseini’s tribute to refugees who have died on such journeys is but one of the many threats to life they encounter. While I live in enforced isolation, I think of the unnamed millions dreading the sunrise. I think that their displaced lives speak more of strength, hope, and resilience than our closed borders do. And I feel immensely sad that we get so concerned with ourselves, we become so inward-looking, that we lose sight of the fact that all lives matter…that there are bigger problems than Covid which continue to plague our world.

The pandemics of inequalities and exclusion are very much alive.

See more:

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/08/30/elimination-isolationist/

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/08/23/what-will-be-our-global-message/

This week I have been immersed in marking student assignments…one of the perks of teaching! We follow a simple principle for student handback – give feedback and feedforward. The feedforward is aimed to give students advice/hints on how to improve their work and provoke thoughts around other possibilities. In my last post, I left some thoughts hanging about the ‘new’ new normal, and after hearing comments from some of those who read the blog (thank you!), I realise that it is hard to imagine a way forward when we are constantly being fed the elimination rhetoric.

Feedback. During the 100 days or so of being Covid-free and living lives as pre-Covid times, we stopped thinking about things like social distancing and hand sanitisers and masks and tests. When the world outside of our borders broadcast news of their ongoing battles with Covid, it seemed surreal, almost as if we were on a different planet…counting our lucky stars while at it. I had conversations where people invariably said they had forgotten lockdown life.

I remember walking into Devonport Chocolates shop a few weeks before lockdown round 2 and seeing a sad-looking bottle of hand sanitiser on a chair outside the front door, sitting on top of a sign that read “Sign in, stop the virus” – that infamous black and yellow Covid tracer card! I debated with myself whether I should use the hand sanitiser, but then thought, “I’m clean, and flipping heck, we are Covid-free”. So, in I went, without signing in and sanitising. The lady in the shop served me with a smile. It’s not her’s/the shop’s fault.

Feedforward. The elimination rhetoric drives the risk of complacency, as we all start to believe and think that elimination has been achieved. But if the messaging from our country managers was more about how to live with the pandemic going forward, we might behave differently. Right now, we are so focused on elimination that we are not looking towards what lies ahead, in the long-term. I think it’s time to wake up and smell the coffee…to recognise that we are part of a global community here, everyone in the world is battling against Covid.

And if “Team NZ” (not my words) is really a team, then we need to be allowed to behave like adults, as members of a team. So that the next time I go into Devonport Chocolates, or any other retailer, without signing in, wearing a mask and sanitising, the staff should feel empowered to not serve me and ask me to leave the shop.

We hear lots of talk about simple messaging. Well, let’s do just that. Let’s have simple, clear rules and consequences around alert levels and not hover, in uncertainty, between levels i.e. the X.5 level. Good leadership demonstrates what good behaviour looks like, long-term. If wearing a mask all the time when in public is the right thing to do, I should feel ashamed not to wear one, and more importantly, I should be aware/fearful of the consequences. Much like the drunk driver has consequences to face for not adhering to the rules.

The alternative is, of course, to continue to isolate, yo-yo-lockdown-style, as individuals and as a country. Our old people already feel isolated. How much longer do we subject them to a world without hugs and visitors and not having loved ones around in their hour of need? And elimination creates the tendency to isolate from the rest of the world.  

After lockdown round 1, I embarked on a curiosity-driven research project within my friends circle, soliciting their views about their lockdown experiences (feedback) and what they thought life would be like going forward (feedforward). My responses were not included in the research project but I shared my views with the participant group. This is what I had said about my feedforward, and for once in my life, I would have liked to be wrong:

“Going forward – is it really going to be a new world that we inhabit post-lockdown/Covid-19? I don’t know how long the acts of kindness around the world will continue. I sense and fear a new wave of isolationist-driven hate speech and actions, against immigrants, refugees, the outsiders – those who (are accused of )‘bring(ing) in or breed(ing)’ illnesses and unwanted what-nots, according to those who want to protect their lands and people. Maybe I am a cynic…” (Vikashni, 10 May, 2020).

Our elimination rhetoric is taking us down a very slippery path. The elimination-leading-to-isolationist actions make us equal to, dare I say it, the Brexiters and Trump supporters. If we are not careful, we will become just like these people…while proudly wearing our Elimination badge. Let us, instead, think about other possibilities.

See more:

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/08/23/what-will-be-our-global-message/

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/09/12/the-uninvited/

I have a set of candles that we use on birthday cakes. These candles re-light themselves a few seconds after they are blown out, much to the embarrassment of the birthday person, while the onlookers burst into streams of laughter as the birthday person attempts, time after time, to extinguish the flame and get on with cutting the cake. Last month my mother happened to be the latest victim and she was out of breath after a few attempts. I sent the video of my poor mum giving up and me laughing out loud all through the video to my friends. One of them recently said to me “Covid is like that re-lighting candle”.

We are in the second weekend of Level 3 lockdown, round 2. And you wonder, if ordinary people think that way about Covid, why does our government insist on eliminating it? Surely, what has happened globally is a testament to the fact that Covid is here to stay, much like our cancers, the common cold and flu, the road accidents…all these things that kill people but we learn to live with it. Isn’t it the wiser thing to say, ‘hey – let’s find a way to live with this thing until we have a cure’?

Obviously, I do not like lockdown the second time around, and no, I did not take part in the recent anti-lockdown protest in Auckland. Back in March, a lockdown was novel, indeed, for a novel virus. And we did all we could to make our country safe. But then we declared victory much too early, with too much ego and pride, only to have the candle re-light itself. But are the onlookers laughing? Well, Donald Trump is, but that’s another story.

Our poor, our vulnerable, our friends and family who suffer from mental health issues, our small business owners, our domestic violence victims, our post-natal depressed mums stuck in the house with a young baby and screaming kids (because daycare centres are closed), while dad goes to work because they need the money, stuck in a situation where she can’t ask for support due to lockdown restrictions and the safety of the newborn…do you hear their laughter?

It is amazing that there are strongly-held views that the current approach by our government is good for the country. It may be good for certain egos – ‘we did it once, we can do it again’ and we can be back on the global stage wearing our badge of ‘Covid Eliminators’. But at what expense? To kick the poor in their guts again and undo some of the rebuilding of livelihoods that were starting to happen post-round 1?

We knew that it was one family, with the initial 4, now just below a 100. Against a population of 1.5 million in Auckland. For the sake of 100 (or less) we subjugate 1.5 million Aucklanders to restrictions on work, on life, on bouncing back from job losses and unemployment. Why does Dunedin for example, which is so far from Auckland and no one from the original cluster travelled there, have to live life at level 2?

Surely, the Covid Eliminators had the capabilities, as demonstrated in the last few weeks, to effectively contact trace and restrict movements of close contacts of the original cluster, without making the whole country move back into lockdown scenarios.

When we blew out the candle the first time around, we became proud and complacent, me included. We were so eager to cut the cake and be joyous about our celebration that we ignored the re-lighting ability of the candle. It will keep on relighting and like my dear mother, we will eventually run out of breath trying to unsuccessfully blow out the candle. We never reached the ‘new normal’ after round 1.

It’s time to learn to live with the novel virus, for long-term sustainability of our livelihoods, including those which continue to struggle thanks to the reactive lockdowns. We can craft a new ‘new normal’ if we put our egos and pride aside and accept that Covid cannot be eliminated until there is a vaccine.

We have 5 million Kiwis who have the answers…somewhere between the two extremes of wanna-be Covid Eliminators and those who refuse to wear masks, we can find the long-term answers. We can look deep within ourselves, our whanau and our communities to craft a new way forward that involves living safely alongside Covid. Let that be the message to eventually broadcast on the global stage.

Vikashni Moore

August 23 2020

See more:

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/09/12/the-uninvited/

http://themoorestory.com/index.php/2020/08/30/elimination-isolationist/