Coronavirus criticism
There is ever growing criticism of the Government’response to the Coronavirus pandemic. First we have the Entrepreneur of the Year Nick Mowbray:
New Zealand entrepreneur of the year Nick Mowbray says the government needs to be doing much more to prevent the spread of coronavirus. …
Mowbray said it was “crazy” that there was no thermal testing at Auckland International Airport and that gatherings were still being allowed to go ahead, while cruise ships were being allowed to dock without any extra precautions.
“It is crazy we are not taking stricter measures.”
I just had a friend call me from Samoa. They went through no fewer than three health checks at the airport – one on the plane, and two at the airport. NZ has none, zero.
Mowbray said while border closures would have an impact on tourism, it was necessary.
We are now an outlier in having our border entirely open to every country except China and Iran. Even our territories have stricter conditions with the Cook Islands having 16 countries on the do not enter list. You can see the full list here.
He said there needed to be better controls at the borders, and gatherings like the Christchurch commemorations should be cancelled.
Again we are now an outlier. Almost every country in Europe has banned mass events over a certain size, as has Australia.
Our Prime Minister must think we’re much smarter than Italy, Japan, China, the UK and everyone else at pandemic control. In letting large gatherings, concerts and public events to go ahead she is ultimately exposing our loved ones and assuming a risk nobody can reasonably measure. We know an infected person attended the Tool concert at Spark Arena on Feb 28th. He’s now in isolation, so hopefully he won’t be at WOMAD.
Iranians are coming to New Zealand for the Christchurch event. The Pasifika event welcomes families living in multi-family living situations who can’t easily self-isolate. Mosh-pits are hotbeds of involuntary fluid swapping.
Ardern has made the wrong call on this one. I’m not happy that she is increasing the risks to the older folks in my life. I urge her to get her head around the wonder of compounding growth rates.
The infections that happen this weekend, and the infections that come from those infections, will be the direct result of risks that were both obvious and easily mitigated.
Pasifika has now been cancelled, but not by the Government. But many other major events going ahead.
Public Health Professor Nick Wilson is a pandemic researcher. Radio NZ reports:
“I think we have, as a country, missed a bit of an opportunity to get this right from the start.”
He said officials should have been collecting the details of all travellers from Asia at the border weeks ago.
Prof Wilson said health workers should then have been following up daily with any travellers who presented symptoms and put themselves under quarantine.
He said the government should even consider barring foreign travellers from countries other than China until more was known about the disease.
“There’s some evidence [that there’s] uncontrolled spread [of the virus] in places like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore.
“We should be thinking about potential restrictions for those travellers as well as.”
He said the government and health officials overall response to the outbreak has been slow.
Some have argued that the Opposition shouldn’t be criticising anything the Government does as this is a health emergency. But the criticism is not just from the Opposition, it is quite widespread.
UPDATE1: Bernard Hickey also very critical:
In the six weeks since the imposition of a travel ban on China in the wake of the first Covid-19 outbreaks, the Government has announced $11 million in tourism marketing and $4m for extra business advisers in regional areas. Yesterday, it announced $12 million of support for drought-hit Northland and the rest of the North Island.
That’s $27m or less than 0.01 percent of GDP in response to what some are calling the biggest macro-economic shock to the global economy since the second world war and the worst drought some parts of the country have seen in 100 years. …
UPDATE2: The Government has finally seen sense and cancelled the large public memorials for the Christchurch mosque shootings tomorrow. Amazed it took them so long, but better late than never. We will have many more opportunities in future to remember the victims of March 15, but hopefully not ones in the middle of a global pandemic.