Last month I wrote my blog on covid-19 pointing out the in our pre Alert Level 4 days that a subject no one had heard here months ago was now dominating the media. An amazing feature of this crisis is how quickly it has swept every other issue aside worldwide. It is now the only focus. Jobs are being lost in droves all over the world. Airlines, tourist industry suppliers including hotels and transport – note Air New Zealand – cafes, restaurants, sport (especially professional sport), entertainment, conferences, and so on and so forth. Many industries and companies are haemorrhaging money. Covid-19 is going to be the issue of 2020, and recovery from covid-19 is going to be initially huge and then the continuing and gradually declining big issue for a number of years now. Getting out of the situation we find ourselves in will need a lot of thought and effort.

I wonder how the election will go in September.  Maybe things will be all sorted by then but somehow I suspect not. Maybe the election will be a reflection on how well the public think the government has managed the covid-19 crisis. It’s hard to see a campaign on the usual left/right type of election topics debates happening. It feels so irrelevant in the current environment. Unless things progress much faster than currently expected it will have to be a virtual campaign. Strange times indeed.

I think the Health Minister was mighty lucky to keep his job. I am not criticising him generally for his job or anything else he has done, but for such a leader (the Health portfolio holder for the country) to breach the rules is shockingly bad in principle. The Scottish Senior Medical Officer was not so lucky. She used her second home when that was banned. She apologised profusely and unreservedly, but that lasted for but a few hours. Then she was gone.     

The problem will not be solved until there is immunity in the population robust enough to stop the disease. ‘Herd immunity’ is the intriguing name epidemiologists use for an immune population. Achieving that requires a vaccine and that is 12 -18 months away depending on which expert you hear quoted.  The only other way to get ‘herd immunity’ is completely unacceptable – that would be to abandon any control attempt and for a sufficiently high portion of the population to have the disease and develop their own antibodies. No one supports that idea. So we have to somehow resist the risk by social distancing, lockdown etc. for at least another twelve months and maybe more. It could be that some areas of New Zealand where the virus appears to be absent can return to a more normal life but there would have to be real movement control to stop a visitor to the area carrying in and setting another cluster alight.

The next step is how we move out of Level 4 to Level 3 and what Level 3 will mean. Level 4 as we know it now will be hard to maintain for too long, as with time illogical features increasingly start to show. Forestry is frozen while most agriculture is deemed ‘essential industry’ and allowed to operate. Butchers and greengrocers are closed down but for some reason they allowed diaries to be classed as ‘essential’ and stay open. Supermarkets are open and will be doing great business I expect. You can order an electric jug from the Warehouse (home appliances are ‘essential goods’) but you can't buy clothing even though it is handled by the same people. These illogicality’s will only get worse. They will have to try to make it all more logical as they start moving back down the alert levels again. 

Meantime the crisis is tearing up the economy for the greater benefit of stopping the disease. It is hard to know just what will be there economically when this is over. The challenge will be to work out this next phase – how we recover.