It is wonderful to watch the mighty fall… not that either Joe Biden or Jacinda Ardern can be in any way classed as ‘mighty’, but until very recently both were the darlings of the world media. It breaks my heart to see how journalists in the US and elsewhere are reviewing their dreadfully biased opinions of President Trump because Biden is actually much worse a president than Trump. Just kidding. I’m delighted they have finally started to face the truth. Biden was always too old, too set in his ways and too inexperienced in the real world to be a good president. And now what are the journalists of the world saying? Guess what! Biden is too old.
You don’t say.
But closer to home, our exalted princess, Helen in a hijab, is also enjoying a significant fall from grace, and it warms the cockles of my heart. Her own bought-and-paid-for media seem to have turned against her; and the world media definitely have. Everywhere I turn, there are articles putting the boot into our once exalted leader. The latest, from a British publication, Unherd, is measured but as scathing as the rest.
While New Zealand has pursued an aggressive elimination strategy, it has — until now — worked, and at relatively low political, economic and social costs. Indeed, the more urgent question now is whether the country’s relative success has lulled it into a sense of complacency, and left it lacking an exit strategy once the pandemic subsides.
Over the past eighteen months, New Zealand has been one of very few countries committed to elimination rather than suppression, with Ardern declaring she wouldn’t put the lives of citizens at risk by trying to live with the virus. The decision was hailed as proof of her leadership driven by empathy and compassion, in stark contrast with the “let it rip” approaches of Johnson or Trump.
However, while it certainly complemented Ardern’s brand, in reality her commitment was driven by the cold reality of a woefully unprepared health system — gutted by decades of austerity — which would struggle to manage even a low number of cases. A March 2020 audit found New Zealand only had 221 ICU beds for a population of 5 million, while its testing and track and tracing capacity was deemed inadequate.
In August 2021, the virus has lost its fear factor. We all know that few people die of it, even fewer from the Delta variant, and that the worst effects are on mental health, split families and delayed procedures for other health conditions. We have sacrificed everything on the altar of COVID… and it wasn’t worth the price we have paid.
So it seems that New Zealand’s commitment to elimination so far has been less “a never-ending nightmare” than an understandable policy with overall low costs. But that doesn’t mean that the country is out of the woods. For ultimately, the issue with Zero Covid is the need for an exit strategy — and this is where the current outbreak has exposed NZ.
On paper, the most obvious exit strategy from Zero Covid is for the whole world to follow it, eliminating the virus once and for all. But the fact that the vast majority of countries have deemed this unfeasible has left New Zealand vulnerable. After all, elimination in one country is not viable in the long term without total isolation from the rest of the world.
The other exit strategy is vaccination. Yet here, New Zealand has stumbled, with only 19.79% of the population fully vaccinated, leaving it second-last in the OECD. The main issue has been complacency. With Covid eliminated, vaccination has not been a burning priority. This resulted in not only the Government setting low vaccination targets that it then crowed about meeting, but among the population only 40% gave any thoughts to vaccination in July. Splendidly isolated in their own little bubble, New Zealanders convinced themselves that the pandemic was happening elsewhere, and did little to prepare for its return. ICU, capacity, for example, has only been increased by 63 beds since March last year, and less than two weeks ago, experts warned a Delta outbreak would risk collapsing the health system.
Now that the Delta strain has arrived, however, the folly of this complacent strategy has been exposed. As other countries have found, measures that worked in crushing the virus last year struggle with its more infectious variant. Cases have grown every day, and the lockdown has already been extended to two weeks, while experts gloomily proclaim the country is on “a knife edge”.
The world has moved on and left us behind. Scott Morrison has admitted that continued lockdowns are not the answer. Nowadays there are treatments for COVID. We understand more about the virus. Even those who were supportive of lockdowns last year are grumbling now. Britain is living with the virus and thriving. We can only watch with envy and hope like hell that this lockdown will end soon – a hope that becomes fainter by the day as more and more cases are announced.
If, on the other hand, the lockdown extends into months, the low-cost nature of elimination will come to be questioned, especially as previous successes recede from view, while the rest of the world moves on from the virus. As Australia shows, overconfidence can quickly give way to recriminations once an elimination strategy leads to a never-ending spiral of lockdowns. In this case, New Zealand may find that Zero Covid is a dead end, from which there is no easy way out.
We already know this. 18 months on from the first lockdown, which had an unofficial slogan of – “Do it once, do it right”, we are into our sixth total or partial lockdown. This is no way to live.
It could be that Ardern’s government is starting to realise this. While committed to stamping out the current outbreak, its Covid-19 Response Minister has conceded that the highly infectious nature of Delta raises “big questions” about the strategy, and that “at some point, we will have to be more open in the future”. Whether a government which has so explicitly nailed its colours to Zero Covid can execute such a pivot remains to be seen.
Unherd
The end result of all of this is that we have a country with no resistance to a more infectious strain of the virus, and also no resistance to other menacing diseases because we have been imprisoned in a hermit kingdom for too long. Overseas, high vaccination rates seem to be working, giving the population more widespread immunity and some idea of how to deal with bigger outbreaks. At some point, we are going to have to go down the same road. But, to date, with only one tool to use against the virus, all we have done is turn ourselves into sitting ducks. Ardern is going to pay the price for this.
In fact, according to the many unfavourable articles I read about her and her zero approach, payback has already started.
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