Let’s be brutally honest about the success of preventing the pandemic gaining a foothold in NZ (you won’t like it)
There are two reasons why NZ has successfully dodged the public health nightmare we are seeing erupt in America and Europe, and you won’t like them.
The first is the genuine courage of Jacinda’s Government to go hard and go early with a lockdown that helped smoother the virus…
Covid-19: ‘New Zealand’s response has been one of the strongest’ – WHO
The World Health Organisation (WHO) says New Zealand has been world-leading in its response to Covid-19.
…and this made us one of the safest places around…
Coronavirus: New Zealand third-safest in the world during Covid-19 pandemic
New Zealand has been hailed as a coronavirus safe haven after an international research group ranks it the third-safest country in the world.
The strict lockdown procedures and rapid response to the virus meant New Zealand was better placed than most to deal with whatever was to come, the research found.
…the Right will bitch and scream that she didn’t go fast enough but the numbers of infection clearly state she did and I remind those who wish to be critical that this is a democracy and you need to bring the people with you and at the time there simply wasn’t the belief that there was even a problem to begin with.
So Jacinda’s courage and incredible leadership communication skills have led us through this despite what Hosking and the Death Cult Capitalists have to say.
The second reason we have dodged a public health nightmare however is a lot less celebratory.
Dumb luck folks.
Dumb bloody luck that we have a huge moat to keep this thing out because the actual public health infrastructure was broken.
Decades and decades of gutting the public service thanks to our neoliberal experiment have left a public health service barely able to fart without breaking the entire system.
Report…
NZ wasn’t ready for a pandemic
In November 2019, University of Otago epidemiologist Nick Wilson was already concerned about a pandemic.
He knew nothing of the novel coronavirus that reports indicate had already emerged in Wuhan, China, but had just reviewed an international assessment of pandemic readiness which found New Zealand had barely half of the measures in place that it needed.
Although the new assessment, the Global Health Security Index (GHSI), ranked New Zealand 35th out of 195 countries, this in itself simply reflected how unready the world was for a pandemic threat. New Zealand had a score of just 54 out of 100 points and ranked 30th among the 60 high-income countries reviewed.
…after report…
New Zealand’s health system was so poorly prepared to “keep out” Covid-19 that we have had to endure extraordinary sacrifices to “stamp it out”, the Epidemic Response Committee heard this morning.
“We squandered our major advantage, which was geography,” said University of Auckland Professor Des Gorman, who is advising the committee.
“The hard work we need to do to stamp it out is because we had failed to keep it out.”
New Zealand should have closed its borders in mid-February, not the end of March, he said, but we didn’t have to resources to do so.
…all identify how broken our public health system is and when you look at the utter failure of the measles pandemic last year, does it surprise anyone that we were so under prepared?
The real reason we are looking at extended controls despite such low infection rate is because we simply don’t have the infrastructure for the track-trace-quarantine part of this response.
Dumb luck is not a social policy!
In the rebuild of this country economically we must look at the proper funding of public services we so desperately require when we get an external global shock and in a climate crisis world those external global shocks will become the norm not the exception.
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“…the Right will bitch and scream that she didn’t go fast enough but the numbers of infection clearly state she did and I remind those who wish to be critical that this is a democracy and you need to bring the people with you and at the time there simply wasn’t the belief that there was even a problem to begin with.”
National didn’t believe there was a housing crisis either UNTIL they were no longer in power. They can bitch and moan all they like, they can tell us what they would have done(in hindsight).
Funny how there was always money available for to construct hotels and sports stadiums, and to dig tunnels under Auckland etc. Funny how there was always money for race tracks and America’s Cup type of activities. And never enough money for hospitals and schools. There was always plenty of money available to spend on advertising, and putting up flags and promoting ostentatious consumption, and never any available to promote permaculture or any other sane response to our collective predicament.
Having spent decades, and multi-billions of dollars, on mal-investments and boondoggles, I suppose we can look forward to further investment in projects/activities that have no future, rather than investments that are appropriate to the phase in human history we have entered.
Even as we progress through early stages of the Age of Consequences [of overconsumption and over-population], the majority of the populace attempt to hang on to the Age of Entitlement, and politicians pander to the ridiculous in order to improve election/re-election prospects (and not rock the boats of their corporate sponsors and masters).
I’m still awaiting the moment when the bulk of the populace recognise that the economy is the problem, not the answer; that the economy makes everything that matters -air quality, water quality, soil quality, biodiversity, climate stability, human living conditions etc.- worse.
I’m still waiting for the moment when it is generally recognised that the choice is between having an industrial global economy for a little longer and our children/grandchildren having a future. As things stand, the majority would rather pass on a grossly overheated planet that is depleted of resources and depleted of biodiversity than change the way they live. And politicians are fully committed to making everything that matters worse.
I’m sure I have a while longer to wait for the much-needed paradigm shift, and that it will come via utter catastrophe the bulk of the populace and those who ‘plan for the future’ are totally unprepared for.
The UK is saying how broken their health system. What is broken in NZ that we should be concerned about is our education system, and how we perceive our country and each other. We need to know what is going on, have an informed say in everything and not just act like entitled spoiled children as modelled by National and ACT. The childish way we think pervades the whole society, and this at a time when knowledge about everything is out there in heaps. We need to cut a lot of our educational time from some stuff we can look up on line. get a grasp of everything, and then concentrate on understanding our personal position in the world, our country’s position in the world, and what the world is. Understand that at home and not go round gazing at it for something to do that you can skite about to your peer group. And up the EQ Emotional Quotient and down the entitlement quotient.
Des Gorman was the nats go to man when they finished demolishing our health system … perhaps we can rebuild as a proper health service