Stuff Digital Edition

Two years in, and we are

Andrea Vance andrea.vance@stuff.co.nz

How is it that we are not prepared? Again. New Zealand’s response to the pandemic in 2020 was lauded worldwide by scientists and the World Health Organisation. Remarkably, it remained Covid-19 free for many days.

That success was a ‘‘major achievement’’, of a flawed and underprepared system, the Government’s own investigators would later conclude.

Heather Simpson and Brian Roche delivered a brutal assessment of the Ministry of Health’s failings in two reports delivered late that year.

The outbreak that led to Auckland being locked down was not picked up early enough. There were examples of confusing messaging and poor coordination. Testing rates were low.

Oddly, the Ministry of Health would not participate in the cross-government group set up to manage the pandemic and didn’t properly share information with ministers or other ministries.

Simpson and Roche forgave the chaos in the early weeks of the emergency, but said it should not be continuing after eight months.

The Government buried the report on the last working day of parliament and shovelled $3 billion at the problem.

2021 dawned with hope: it was to be the year of the vaccine and a travel bubble opened with Australia. Delta arrived. And again, we were not ready.

Officials began talking about preparations in July, but their programme of work wasn’t due to be finished by mid-September.

It was too late. The day after they briefed Minister Chris Hipkins on the plan, the variant crashed through our border defences.

There was no excuse for the complacency. The strain was first discovered in October 2020 in India. New Zealand had already had two brushes, in April and in June, when an outbreak was miraculously avoided after an Australian traveller toured Wellington tourist spots.

Epidemiologist David Skegg, the head of the Government’s Covid-19 Public Health Advisory Group, had urged the Government to start preparing. But, just as it had been with the delivery of

vaccinations, the Government was on its own timeline. It was always going to be hard to inoculate enough people before Delta arrived, but once again we started the race from behind.

By international standards the vaccine roll-out was staggeringly slow, only ramping up in the last quarter of the year. The Government was slow to start negotiating for, purchasing and approving doses. It initially opted for just the Pfizer jab, which limited supplies.

What is perhaps most unforgivable is the initial failure to engage with and fund Ma¯ ori health providers. As a result of the ‘‘one-size fits all’’ approach Ma¯ ori were left behind.

We’ll never know if a faster vaccination programme could have prevented the Auckland lockdown. But it does mean that many of us are now facing a new, highly transmissible variant, Omicron, without the protection of booster jabs. That will be the case for many weeks to come, even with reduced times between jabs, and rates are dangerously low.

The timeline for delivering vaccines to children was also too slow. And a perverse insistence on relying on PCR testing means that the Government permitted the use of the rapid antigen tests just as a global shortage of the kits bites.

Once again, our defences are unprepared.

A deeply worrying classified report, leaked to Ma¯ ori TV last week, reveals just how ill-equipped the health system is.

Intensive care beds are ‘‘limited’’ across district health boards, with 36 per cent, or 108 ICU beds, available with the imminent threat of Omicron seeping through the border. Shamefully, there is no ICU capacity in either Hawke’s Bay or the West Coast.

And because fewer of us have been exposed to Covid, thanks to the elimination strategy pursued until late last year, we do not have the protective immunity benefits of prior infections. Omicron will hit harder here than in the US and Europe, the report warns.

Yale University’s Anne Wyllie says she is ‘‘terrified’’ about how unprepared her home country is, saying we urgently need to ramp up saliva testing of border workers.

Government advisers also fear panic buying of food, protective masks and medication.

We are vulnerable to the supply chain problems that Omicron has caused in other countries. ‘‘The big sick’’ will put a significant chunk of the workforce into isolation. On top of this, New Zealand has an existing truck driver shortage.

The pool of migrant workers that could have picked up the slack has been reduced to a dribble, with ministers demonstrating a dogmatic inflexibility.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson says the Government is working hard, and closely with business leaders on the issue.

However, the planning is not fast or detailed enough for the business community. Their concerns are dismissed by Labour’s supporters as whinging, but we’ll all be complaining when the rubbish piles up, the supermarket shelves are bare, and we can’t replace basic household items.

The response is geared towards keeping Omicron out for as long as possible, and slowing down transmission when it does arrive. Actually coping when it inevitably tears through the community seems to be an afterthought.

It is unfathomable that is where we find ourselves as we enter the pandemic’s third year.

The only thing we can now be prepared for are more lockdowns and a prolonged closure of the border.

Opinion

en-nz

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

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