“Today, sometime after 10.30 am Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her Cabinet will make the decision of their careers” reads the first paragraph of the front-page report, but that’s not true.
The decision of their careers was to ignore the advice of New Zealand’s top epidemiologists, who on March 6th, 2020 urged the government to impose travel bans on countries exhibiting:
“over 50 new laboratory-confirmed cases in any day in the last 4 weeks or if a country currently has over a set number of cumulative cases (eg, 200 cases)”
If the decision had been taken to follow that advice we would not be where we now find ourselves. Using the recommended criteria, and making the correct decision in a timely manner, (travel restrictions imposed beginning March 9th, 2020) would have curtailed the arrival of international visitors from Germany, Spain, France, The United Kingdom, Belgium, The Netherlands and Switzerland (the vast bulk of all visitors from Europe) along with those coming from The United States and Japan, these adding to the countries already restricted which were China, Iran, South Korea and Italy.
As we all know, to our cost, the government didn’t make that call and over the fortnight to March 19th, 2020: 36,640 potentially infected time-bombs crossed our border: 1,990 from Japan, 15,270 from The USA along with 19,380 from Europe.
Given that 1-2 people per thousand from those countries were testing positive for COVID-19 I don’t have to tell you that a reasonable guess says we imported 37-74 infected souls. And, given an average stay of 8 days, a re-infection rate (R0) adopted by NZMOH of 2.5 and an incubation rate of 48-72 hours, that those carriers possibly cross-infected (on the low side- we don’t do worst-case scenarios here) around 562 people by March 21st.
Sure: many of those re-infected will have been members of their own tour groups and flown out again without counting among our statistics, or even being aware they were carriers. Let’s say half of them did – that still leaves 281 new Covid-19 cross-infections in the New Zealand community by March 21st.
What a wonderful head-start our government truly gave the pandemic: it was the toughest decision of their careers, and they blew it, they failed.
Now: we’re all paying the price. All of us.