First, it was no evidence to suggest masks are effective, then we had the great push for masks.

Just yesterday morning Dr Ashley Bloomfield was on Mike Hosking’s radio show telling him off for suggesting that people who tested positive should be put into mandatory supervised quarantine.

Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield confirmed today a Mt Albert Grammar student in Auckland had tested positive – a person who was a close contact of the family whose members have tested positive.

He did not know if the student was one of the four probable cases announced yesterday. He said some of the original family who had tested positive were in quarantine – but not all of them.

“We don’t round up people in New Zealand, Mike,” Bloomfield told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking this morning. “We round up sheep, we don’t round up people.”

That was a categorical rejection of mandatory quarantine or isolation for people who test positive.

Worse, it was rejected as degrading and akin to rounding up sheep.

And just 5 hours later he was issuing health orders to do precisely that.

There are 13 new Covid cases in Auckland and they all will now go into quarantine.

All of the 13 cases are linked to the original four confirmed cases from the new outbreak in South Auckland. The new cases include children. One is a girl aged one to four while the other is a boy between the ages of five and nine. Another girl who tested positive is aged between 10 and 14, while a teenage male (age from 15-19) is among the new cases.

Family members of confirmed cases may also be required to go into quarantine, director general of health Ashley Bloomfield says.

Bloomfield said they’d given moving confirmed cases into quarantine facilities “a lot of thought”. It would help prevent spread between family members and limit the spread in the community from people coming to visit.

A lot of thought? Five hours earlier this clown was mocking Mike Hosking. Now he’s issued health orders “rounding up” people for compulsory quarantine.

There can only be one reason for this. They simply don’t trust them to self isolate.

But how can we be sure that this quarantine facility will be any better than what we’ve had so far, the failings of which every Aucklander is now suffering for.

This is an unmitigated disaster and it can only be because of abject failure at the border. They said we had eliminated the virus, they said we had more than 100 days with no community transmission. They clearly lied.

They had one job. We went 100 days with no community transmission and then three days later we find out it is now rampant in the community and a third of New Zealand’s population is now suffering under the resulting economic deprivation of a lock down.

The government was in control of the border and quarantine, no one else. Now it’s in the wild in South Auckland.

Meanwhile they are going back to a strategy that has clearly failed us. That is the very definition of stupidity.

This wave is going to be very different from the first, that mostly affected only the aged and those who had travelled recently. This is now in the depths of South Auckland.

If this appears in the South Island then that’s on the government too.

The brilliant idea to isolate people around the country looks like a really retarded decision now. If there is community spread in the South Island it can only have come from the policy of moving those in isolation around the country.

Jacinda Ardern wanted a COVID election.

Well, now she’s got one and it will focus on their failures to keep the virus out.

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As much at home writing editorials as being the subject of them, Cam has won awards, including the Canon Media Award for his work on the Len Brown/Bevan Chuang story. When he’s not creating the news,...