Finally, we have had a sensible suggestion from a politician, and it wasn’t from Jacinda Ardern either.
Aussie Prime Minister Scott Morrison has suggested we stop talking about cases.
A focus on case numbers was very important when we knew nothing about this virus and whether our hospital system would be able to cope.
A lot has changed since then. Increasingly we need to look beyond just the case numbers to know what our future holds. How we can keep safe and how we get our lives back in a Covid world.
Case numbers are important, but they are not the whole story.
Scott Morrison, Op-ed
The numbers I revealed the other day from England show that case numbers are wholly misleading.
So while right now our national strategy is necessarily about suppressing the virus and vaccinating as many people as possible, a one-eyed focus on just case numbers overlooks the fact that less people are getting seriously ill, let alone dying.
Shifting our focus from just case numbers, to actually looking at how many people are becoming seriously ill and requiring hospitalisation will be increasingly what matters. After all, this is how we manage all other infectious diseases.
Hallelujah!
As the Government here ramps up the fear factor scaring everyone and essentially bullying them into getting something loosely described as a vaccine, they necessarily focus on case numbers.
But as we have seen for months now out of MIQ, loads of people have had the much-maligned Delta variant, but none have required hospital treatment, much less ICU treatment and zero have died.
The Delta Variant isn’t a killer. The numbers from England prove that.
So, why the focus from our Government on case count? It can only be to scare people. Presently just five people “across the motu” (across the country, in plain English) are in hospital from the supposedly “deadly” delta variant and none, repeat none, are in ICU.
Right now you stand as much chance of dying from the vaccine as from the CCP Virus with deaths being on a par with each other.
Just as we’ve seen overseas in places like the UK, even when their case numbers tick up, their hospitalisations and deaths are not increasing at the same rate and remaining flatter and at rates like you see with the flu.
More people die from the flu every year but we don’t have lockdowns for that. We don’t have Ashley Bloomfield announcing how many people were diagnosed with cancer today, or meningitis, so why do we do this for the CCP Virus?
Right now, as I see it the Government’s elimination plan is going to fail. It has to fail given their present default settings.
Why?
Because they are ignoring what has happened in every other country with Delta. They are also ignoring the fact that their default settings of a locked up border and MIQ has likewise failed.
The UK, Israel, India, Fiji, Australia and many other countries all have exploding case numbers, all with Delta and all with higher vaccination rates than New Zealand.
Can anyone else see the folly of pursuing an elimination strategy in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that hard lockdowns work?
India alone stamped out the spread of Delta, not through vaccines but rather through widespread dosages of Ivermectin, but you won’t be seeing that any time soon in the media, mainly because the Government invested heavily in vaccines, and the media to push the vaccination messaging.
It would be a great start to implement Scott Morrison’s suggestion of removing the focus on the case count.
But chance would be a fine thing. The NZ Herald which ran this op-ed could set an example.
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