Yesterday, I was involved in the normal Kiwi activity of helping a friend move. I have now returned home questioning the friendship due to the values and actions I saw emerge as the day went on.
Early in the morning while we were putting together dining tables and swapping out curtains, their 16-year-old rang from boarding school to explain that she wasn’t feeling that well. The information given also included the fact that 6 others in her boarding house at school had tested positive for Covid and it turns out the Duke of Edinburgh tramp she was on at the weekend also had participants who have since tested positive.
What to do? What are the logistics around this?
I naively thought that ‘doing the right thing’ would mean taking advice from the school, having a test to confirm and then looking at ways of self isolating or travelling the couple of hours to bring her home, if it was a positive result.
The decisions taken were:
1) Not to do a RAT (these are readily available at the school).
2) Organise the booking of the daughter on an InterCity bus to ensure she could get home the next day without mum having to travel to school to pick her up.
Later that day, I had to wait outside a cafe whilst said friend bought our lunch.
I was not allowed to go and choose our ”lunch on the go” for reasons of having chosen not to have an experimental jab. On occasion this choice had caused a little tension between us due to said friend being a medical doctor, triple jabbed. At times they have mocked my choice without ever having made the slightest indication of doing any research of their own, beyond reading the NZ Herald.
They had also supported their 16 year old in having the jab, vaccination card proudly displayed after her first jab at our regular dinner, for “having done the right thing”.
We continued with the tasks of the day to help unload a fridge and reinstall doors onto a wardrobe, doing the right thing by being fellow Kiwis.
Meanwhile, today, there is a 16 year old travelling on an InterCity bus with a very high probability of active Covid and, with Omicron, a very high probability of passing it on.
I hope the decisions I saw yesterday are not necessarily the norm, but I am the one who can’t sit in my favourite café or have a hair cut and seem to be receiving punishment for not doing the right thing.
When I see this example of how others are behaving, it makes me wonder: how many others are still ‘doing the right thing’ for the rest of New Zealand?
PS
I suspect my GP ‘friend’ will be at work tomorrow irrespective of the state of health of the daughter.