The Herald reports:

The administration costs for the Government’s gun buyback scheme are believed to have cost nearly double the initial estimate, a report shows. …

In March last year, police produced an initial estimate of $18m to administer the scheme.

“The estimate was based on limited information from the Australian buyback scheme and was completed quickly, before the costs of the supporting technology were fully known,” Ryan said.

“The police now estimate that, once fully completed, administering the scheme will have cost up to $35m. This includes costs of tracked staff time, contractors, and goods and services.

Maybe to make it easier in future we should just automatically double whatever the Government says something will cost, to get an idea of the likely real cost.

Stuff reports:

A Christchurch man is pleading for government officials to exempt him from quarantine so that he can see his dying wife one last time.

Mining contractor Bernie Ryan returned from Australia on Sunday after his wife Christine Taylor’s condition worsened.

He is currently under managed isolation at a hotel in Auckland, and said despite showing no illness symptoms and a letter of support from his GP, the Ministry of Health has repeatedly refused his request for exemption.

Taylor has terminal lung cancer and has been given hours to live.

Again bureaucracy gone mad.

He said the refusal was devastating.

“Well … I cried, and basically a friend suggested that maybe we can get in contact with the media and if not for me, for other people that may have to go through this scenario,” Ryan said.

He asked the government to show sympathy towards New Zealanders in similar situations.

“Well, I’m a proud Kiwi, we’re the best country in the world, just [show] some compassion … instead of these generic emails I’ve been getting, what about just some compassion? And not every case is the same is basically is what I’m saying,” Ryan said.

“It’s breaking my heart really.”

The Ministry of Health said Ryan would have received a letter explaining why his application has been declined, and its exemptions team will contact him to explain further.

This is just nasty.

If one can have 100,000 supermarket employees turning up to work every day, we can allow two dozen NZers with dying relatives visit their dying parents or partners.

The default position for anyone in this position should be they gain an exemption, so long as suitable safety precautions are adopted in terms of travel and PPE and testing.

Should Parliament step in to enforce a nationwide rates freeze, what’s happening in Botany and should our relationship with China change? Islay Aitchison interviews Jami-Lee Ross.

You can subscribe to Taxpayer Talk via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio and all good podcast apps.

Support the show (http://www.taxpayers.org.nz/donate)

The Herald reports:

Māori and Pacific patients could be prioritised for some elective surgeries and appointments as DHBs look to reshape a health system emerging from lockdown.

As alert level 2 nears, Auckland, Waitematā, Counties Manukau and Northland DHBs are preparing to tackle waiting lists lengthened by the postponement of procedures, and identify people with the highest clinical need.

“These are frequently Māori and Pacific peoples and they are also often the first to miss out at times of high demand or when there are other barriers to healthcare,” a spokeswoman for the DHBs said.

People accepted for treatment are often given a priority ranking. For example, priority one patients are considered urgent and might be seen within two weeks, priority two may be seen within six to eight weeks, and priority three and non-urgent cases face a wait of months.

One option that’s been discussed is bumping Māori and Pacific patients up a priority band in certain instances, the Weekend Herald understands.

That would be about as terrible a decision as you could make. Surigical priority should be based on an individual’s actual clinical need, not on whether or not they have a great great grand parent of a particular race.

Jim Rose writes:

Big outlays on infrastructure to rebuild the economy are a bad idea because it takes several years for any infrastructure spending to pick up speed.

The Greens want to cover the country with electric railways. It will take several years to work out where they might go, what is precisely wanted, let tenders, for contractors to acquire land and then a few years from now there are workers hired to new jobs in the construction industry.

Infrastructure projects have a terrible history of cost overruns and benefit shortfalls. The average cost overrun for rail projects is 45 per cent; costs over run in nine out of 10 projects. Benefits from rail projects fall short of projections by an average of 50 per cent.

This is key. Rail infrastructure won’t result in any increased economic activity (except consultants) for many years. It will do nothing to help mitigate the economic recession we now face.

And the history of cost overruns and over-estimated benefits means that you really want BCRs well above one to be sure any investment adds up.

The industries doing worst because of Covid-19 are in the in-person services sectors: travel, tourism, education exports, entertainment, cafés, pubs and restaurants.

Do the workers hired for an infrastructure project seem to come from the same part of the labour market skill domain as workers in travel, tourism, education and retail?

Those who work in outdoor hard-labour jobs and those who work in indoor personal service jobs are cut  from a different cloth.

The Government appears to want to throw money away big time at the opposite end of the economy to where most of the 20 per cent unemployment is right now.

Also an excellent point.

When the hundreds of thousands of unemployed travel, tourism and retail sector workers look for new jobs this winter, infrastructure projects that don’t start hiring until a few years from now are of no use to them.

What the Government can do now is change incentives for businesses. Deregulation and a lower company tax rate are an immediate boost to the ability to stay in business. We could close to halve the company tax rate by abolishing the regional growth fund and corporate welfare.

Much better ideas.

The Herald reports:

Katie Nimon has been selected as National’s candidate in Napier for the 2020 general election.

She will go up against incumbent Napier MP Stuart Nash.

Nimon is currently the general manager of her family’s 115-year-old bus company, Nimon Luxury Passenger Transport, based in Hawke’s Bay and Taupo.

She has been working in the business since she was 14.

The National Party said it was thrilled someone like Nimon, who has immense experience in business and regional tourism, has put their hand up.

“I’m incredibly excited to be selected as the National Party’s candidate for Napier and I’m looking forward to getting out and earning Napier’s trust,” Nimon said.

Nimon has an Executive MBA and a bachelor’s degree in Design from Massey University, and a Diploma in Performance from Trinity College London.

Nimon is only 28 but has been working for over half her life in an SME. We need more people in Parliament with her experience.

I thought it would be interesting to look at how the 37 OECD countries have all done with Covid-19. As they are all fully developed economies, it is a reasonable set to compare between.

The first compare is tests done per million residents, where higher is of course better.

So Iceland by far has done the most testing at 15% of their population. Six countries have tested over 5% of their population and 12 countries over 4%. NZ is a respectable 13th at 3.8% of the population tested.

Four countries have tested under 1% of the population – Greece, Colombia, Japan and Mexico.

Now we have the number of known cases per million population.

Japan has the fewest cases per capita at around 0.01%. Australia is 7th at 0.027% and NZ at 0.031%.

The countries with the most cases are Luxembourg, Spain, Iceland, Ireland and Belgium.

Of course there is some relation between how much you test and how many positive cases you get. So what is the ratio of cases to tests?

NZ has the lowest number of positive tests at 0.8%. Australia and Lithuania much the same.

12 countries have a rate of over 10% with Mexico the highest at 25% – which suggests more testing there would see many more cases.

How what about deaths per capita?

So Australia and NZ doing best closely followed by Slovakia, South Korea, Japan and Colombia.

At the other end the worst are Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, France and Sweden.

Now how many deaths have occurred compared to known cases?

Once again NZ and Australia doing well with only around 1.5% of known cases being fatal.

Iceland has the lowest rate which probably reflects they have done so much testing and found more people who had a mild version.

Nine countries have rates in excess of 10% which is massive. This suggests that their actual infection rate is much higher as you wouldn’t expect fatality rates to vary so much per country.

Overall Australia and New Zealand have done very well.

On Thursday we move to a semi Level 2.

Retails, malls, gyms, playgrounds reopen on Thursday 14 May.

Educational facilities on Monday 18 May.

Bars on Thursday 21 May.

Parties will be limited to maximum size of 10.

Stuff reports:

A woman has launched a petition to Parliament to ban all freedom camping for non-residents.

Jennifer Branje, who runs the South Island visitor guide website South Proud, said the coronavirus pandemic was a perfect time to “reassess” the tourism industry.

She launched the petition in a bid to stop freedom camping as a support for New Zealand tourism providers. …

It asks “that the House of Representatives urges the Government to abolish all freedom camping for non-residents of New Zealand in support of local tourism providers, and to cease allocating taxpayer revenue for further development of free camping sites.”

Branje said New Zealand now had the ability to reassess how its tourism industry would reset after Covid-19.

“I believe we need value not volume. While freedom camping has previously been allowed, I believe the way forward is to abolish freedom camping for all non-residents in support of our local tourism operators,” she said. 

Ms Branje thinks that if she bans a certain type of tourism, this will benefit tourism operators.

Its a nuts argument.

If you ban freedom campers that doesn’t mean we’ll get more non freedom campers.

Also her premise is based on a bad assumption, that freedom campers spend less. MBIE found:

International visitors to New Zealand who did some freedom camping had a tendency to spend more on average. Average spend for those who did some freedom camping was $4,400 per visitor in 2017 and 2018, and although it was higher than the national average, the overall trend was similar.

One of the major reasons for a high average spend per visitor is that people who did some freedom camping tended to stay longer. The average length of stay for visitors who did some freedom camping was 46 days in 2017 and 2018, almost 3 times longer than the average of all other visitors (17 days).

So freedom campers are worth more to NZ than other tourists.

The number of international visitors who did some freedom camping in New Zealand has been rising recently, from 54,000 in the year ended 2013 to around 123,000 in the year ended 2018. This followed a period of moderate growth from around 10,000 visitors at the beginning of the 2000’s.

Total estimated spending by visitors who did some freedom camping has also increased significantly in this period, from $210 million in 2013 to $540 million in 2018.

So why would we turn down $540 million of spending?

UPDATE: The petition has been withdrawn due to a backlash, including reportedly threats to the author. That is regrettable. She has the right to call for a ban, just as we have the right to call it stupid and harmful.

Stuff reports:

Stuff’s Australian owner says it terminated talks with New Zealand media company NZME last week.

NZME, owner of the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB, said in a statement to the NZX on Monday morning that it was seeking urgent legislation to allow it to buy rival publisher Stuff “for $1″by the end of May.

But Stuff owner Nine said in a release to the ASX that while Nine had had discussions with NZME regarding the acquisition of Stuff, “Nine has notified NZME that it has terminated further engagement with NZME”.

Fascinating that NZME thinks Stuff is only worth $1.

They seem to have shat in their own nest with their statement, as Nine have now told them to go away.

The idea of the Government passing a special law to allow the two main print media companies to merge is abhorrent. This would create one mega company that would be politically beholden to the Government.

Donal Curtin writes:

We’re about to have the most important Budget in a generation. There’s no question that Grant Robertson has inherited one of the most difficult challenges – probably the greatest – in living memory. What he does, or doesn’t do, will define how, at a minimum, we cope in the near-term with covid, and, in all probability, will have longer-term repercussions on how our economy behaves and evolves. I wish him well. I doubt if there’s anyone, from any end of the political spectra, who’d disagree.

So there’s obviously an enormous public interest in what he’s going to do on Budget day, May 14.

Normally, the people most interested in fiscal policy sign up for the ‘lock up’ – a vetted group of people, mostly the media but also the likes of bank economists and sectoral lobbyists – who on Budget day get access (usually mid-morning) to the Budget documents ahead of their release, subject to a time embargo. The deal is, if you’ve got a strong interest in fiscal policy, and Treasury agrees you’re a player in that space, you get to see the stuff in a controlled environment, and with the advantage of the preparation time, you will be able to provide informed commentary, but (because of the agreed embargo) not before the Minister of Finance does his thing in the House. Works for everyone. I’ve been in lots of them.

But not this year. I won’t be there: neither will the bank economists, the trade unions, the farming organisations, the investment managers. Here’s what’s happened.

Earlier this week I asked Treasury what this year’s arrangements were going to be, given that the usual physical gathering in the Beehive was obviously out of the question.

Back came the answer that “the Minister and the Speaker of the House have arranged for a Restricted Budget Briefing to be held at Parliament for accredited members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery only”.

A terrible decision. This massively restricts the ability of media and analysts to provide analysis of the Budget at the same time as the Government releases the Budget.

In the absence of such analysis, then the scores of ministerial press releases will be the dominant narrative.

The gallery journalists are usually supplemented by their specialist business and economics colleagues. There is so much material to get through you need a lot of people to do it.

It is ridiculous to say that the lockup could not occur without a larger attendance. You could fit dozens and dozens in the normal room it is in, with two metre spacing.

You could also use additional rooms – have one for media, one for analysts etc.

Of all the Budgets in all the world, this is the one that should be most open to immediate analysis. The powers that be can, and should, rethink.

Absolutely. This is a terrible decision.

UPDATE: The Government has backed down and is now allowing 25 economists and analysts to attend, which is good.

A guest post by Lee Short:

I find myself in the rare position of being involved in two almost identical businesses operating on both sides of the Tasman. The companies sell identical products and services throughout New Zealand and Australia. Both employ just over 100 people and have similar turnovers. Currently, the Australian business is going extremely well, whereas the previously profitable New Zealand business is losing, and will continuing to lose substantial money since the imposition of lockdown.

Given the two Nations similarities in many respects, I think we can confidently step back and compare how both countries are tracking through this COVID-19 pandemic.

Fundamentally, this is a story of two governments and their differing response to the crisis. The Australian Government has committed to preserving jobs by keeping the economy going, no doubt aware that creating a job is so much harder than preserving one. On the other hand, the New Zealand Government chose instead to shut down the economy. As a result, I believe thousands of businesses will close or drastically shrink, and unemployment will grow significantly.

The initial focus by Governments in both countries was quite rightly the health and well-being of the citizens. Australia and New Zealand have achieved admirable results compared to many other countries, particularly the comparatively low number and rate of deaths from COVID-19. The number of deaths per 100,000 population in both countries is much the same. However, the big difference is that Australia will emerge with their economy virtually intact, while we have done serious damage to ours. There is significant business failure happening now in New Zealand that could have been avoided, and still can be in my opinion.

The Ardern Government has done many things right, although I believe closing the border was late. However, when I look at many of the Government politicians and public servants who are advising the prime minister, I am not filled with confidence. They pop their heads up regularly, offering their opinions such as “business should have seen this coming”, “these business failures are due to undercapitalization”, “we are world leaders in COVID- 19 control” and “we have done everything we could.”

I see a stark difference between the wealth creators and those untouched and shielded from the impact on the business world. They are not having their pay slashed and are not suffering unemployment or the threat of it. Business owners and employees provide the wealth that funds those in the public service. They take risks, many borrowing substantial sums, some making sacrifices for years. The result is companies that pay tax and employ staff who pay tax. These taxes keep those in public service in employment.

We now face a substantially different future. Numerous businesses will not survive the lockdown, and many of those that do will only be able to continue by adding substantially more debt to the balance sheet. They will be trimming as many costs as they can, seeking to survive the impacts of lost business. Many will also have lost substantial equity and business value that they have worked hard to generate. Their family of employees have also taken substantial reductions in wages and often forfeited annual holidays to maintain incomes and support the business.

Therefore, I believe it is only fair that we in turn demand a clean out in the government, councils, and other public service organisations (essential workers excluded) to substantially reduce their ongoing costs and the burden on the taxpayer. A period on 80% of their salaries, starting with Members of Parliament and senior public servants, would certainly focus their minds on what is happening in the private sector, encouraging them to offer further support to the wealth creators.

Some will say business has the had the benefit of the government wage support package. Yes, we do, and we are grateful for this. However, it only covers around one month’s normal wages, as the balance is topped up to 80% by employers who are also shouldering other costs.

When I see MPs not realising there are substantial fixed costs, such as rent and insurance, not being met by assistance, it reinforces that they have no idea how business operates. Preserving jobs should be the absolute priority for this Government, as widespread unemployment will do considerable damage to the country.

The Ardern Government now needs to move quickly to give substantially more assistance to all businesses that need help to get through this. Business want to preserve jobs while reorganising to survive the disruption and uncertainty. In time, we will reflect on the tale of two neighbouring countries and how they each acted to protect their economies during COVID-19. I believe Australia has followed the better path.

Lee Short is a Director of Hydraulink Fluid Connectors, a long-established New Zealand company also trading in Australia and the Asia Pacific region.   

TOP have announced:

• $13,000 annual universal basic income (UBI);
• $2,080 annual child universal basic income (paid to parents);
• Flat tax of 33% on all income from all sources for all entities; and
• Risk free return method (RFRM) tax on assets.

The policy has the sums attached to it and adds up, but there are some issues around it which are glossed over.

The first and biggest is that the UBI is $250 a week. Current NZ Super is $423 a week so they are proposing a 39% reduction in the level of NZ Super.

I can’t imagine any government ever ever ever doing that. It’s a suicide note. Even TOP realise this so they dilute their pure UBI by having a top up for NZ Super.

Secondly while it is great for those without kids, those on middle income with kids would get less. Take a one income family on $50,000 with 2 kids.

Their current situation is:

Tax $8,020
WFF $12,532
Net Tax -$4,512

Under UBI it is:

Tax: $16,500
UBI Adult: 13,000
UBI Kids: $4,160
Net Tax: -$660

So they are $3,852 worse off. Again not going to be popular campaigning to cut the income of low income families.

Also worth noting the 1% annual property tax. So if you are retired but in a $1 million home you also get a $10,000 annual property tax bill.

Bob Jones writes:

There’s a clamour from retailers for government (you and me) to subsidise their shop rentals.

Justice Minister Andrew Little said, “We’ve heard the calls to subsidise rent or to freeze rents. However, both of these approaches would have meant commercial property owners would have had their income protected at a time when no-one else enjoys that privilege”.

That of course is true, however, Andrew should note no lessor is asking him to do that. Instead, I suspect I’d speak for most when I say they’d rather the government stayed out of interfering with clear contractual relationships.

Sir Bob is arguing against something that would in fact benefit him.

He points out landlords regularly deal with tenants who have problems paying:

My company owns the most CBD shops in Wellington because we own the most prime CBD office buildings.

Again, as with shopping centres there are constant situations arising in which retailers get into difficulty.

If it’s a one-off financial hit for some reason or other, we will suspend rent for say 3 months then spread its repayment, interest free, in small supplementary payments thereafter.

That in fact is precisely what we offered most of them long before the lockdown arose but when it was evident things were going to get tough.

So most landlords are already showing flexibility with rent.

Newshub reports:

On Wednesday, the Epidemic Response Committee heard some of the sacrifices New Zealanders made under the strict lockdown rules, including Jennifer Rouse who reflected on the day she was diagnosed with cancer.

She told the committee she experienced “overwhelming distress and anxiety added to a life-threatening breast cancer diagnosis” on the day of lockdown.

Rouse was forced to pay $15,000 for a mastectomy after being warned of the wait for a free public surgery, which she said was “almost all my savings so it does leave me vulnerable”.

Face-to-face consultations have been replaced by phone calls, and the impact of that was highlighted by Cancer Society Medical Director Chris Jackson.

“I had to speak with one young mum and tell her over the telephone that her cancer had returned and she was incurable and that she was going to die from her illness,” Jackson told the committee.

“Normally, you’d be able to sit with her and her family and support people in an environment and work through things carefully and gently. We’ve had to do that by telephone.”

The committee also heard about a woman who was forced to learn she had miscarried, alone, with her husband waiting for two hours in the hospital car park – also alone.

“From the car park where we said our goodbyes my wife was then left to navigate alone through the halls of a fairly empty hospital, finding her way to the ultrasound, be scanned and told by medical staff that her pregnancy had no heartbeat,” husband Bjorn Reymer said.

“She was then given a box of tissues and left in the scanning room alone to gain her composure and proceed to the next stages of the miscarriage.”

The committee also heard from David Moger, chief executive of New Zealand Funeral Directors, who told MPs about an 18-year-old son who had tragically took his own life during lockdown.

“The last view of their son that their parents had was him being taken away from that scene and they were unable to then subsequently see and view, as would normally be the case, their son at peace.”

MPs also heard from a Wellington mum who had her partner – her support – taken away straight after giving birth, which she said felt “inhumane”.

She was unable to have the natural water birth she had planned.

“I felt disempowered like my body was not my own, like I had no choice in the way in which I birthed, I felt like an animal.”

Some of these situations may have been unavoidable but not all of them were. The decision to requires partners of women giving birth to leave hospitals straight after birth was inflexible inhumane bureaucracy of the sort that also denied a man permission to see his dying father.

Good Government is about weighing up risk vs harm, not blindly saying no to everything.

Paul Glass in the Herald has a number of suggestions for how to help save the economy. They are:

• Move to Level 2 on Mon 11 May
• Explain rules for L2 asap
• Reverse 8% increase in minimum wage
• Review all ineffective government expenditure
• Don’t pick some sectors out for special treatment – provide the right economic framework
• Provide clarity around rent relief, the 2nd largest expense after staff for many
• Improve healthcare system with fewer DHBs
• Have economic stats released more quickly

Stuff reports:

New Zealand’s longest river is off limits during Level 3 for spiritual healing, creating mixed reactions from those who’ve waited weeks to get back on the water.

Fishers, rowers and kayakers aching to get back on the Waikato River after being locked inside are being asked to wait after the kīngitanga placed a rāhui on it in response to Covid-19, prohibiting food gathering and recreational activities. A rāhui was also placed on the Waipā River.

Spiritual healing for a river. Did a Taniwha shit in it?

A guest post by Barry Brill:

Since my guest post on the cost/benefit of New Zealand’s Level 4 lockdown, it has become evident that the benefits of Level 4 are much lower than we all thought – when expressed in terms of lives saved.

 ”Many people who die of Covid would have died anyway within a short period,” says

Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter at the University of Cambridge: “Nearly 10% of people aged over 80 will die in the next year … and the risk of them dying if infected with coronavirus is almost exactly the same.”

Sir David has produced an astonishing graph to demonstrate that no age group’s risk of dying during 2020 has been materially increased by the arrival of the new coronavirus. Let me repeat that:  Covid-19 has not increased anybody’s statistical risk of dying in this current year.

“Many people who die of Covid .. would have died anyway within a short period,” he says.

Knowing exactly how many is impossible to tell at this stage, but Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead modeller at Imperial College London, has suggested it could be up to two-thirds.

If our Government had decided to stay with Level 2 Alert restrictions, instead of opting for world-leading restrictions, we would almost certainly have had far fewer deaths than Sweden. That’s because Sweden has suffered 225 deaths per million of population while no country in the Southern Hemisphere has seen figures worse than 10 deaths/million. However, conservatively assuming that we mirrored Sweden, Level 2 could have seen 1,100 New Zealand deaths – of which about one-third might not otherwise have happened this year. That’s 367 extra deaths.

This does not mean that the 367 additional people who survived 2020 would have lived for very much longer. We know that they would all have been sick and would be aged around 82 on average. Let’s assume that they will now live for a further five years, on average, as a result of the Level 4 lockdown. That’s 1,835 life-years.

If saving 1,835 life-years were costless, Level 4 would have been a no-brainer for the Government. But of course it wasn’t. We all know that the price was very high, whether expressed in dollars or in lives. And some recent work at the University of Bristol allows us to estimate how high.

As the BBC reports, researchers have measured the lost life-expectancy from a prolonged economic dip and found that it could outweigh the benefit of a long-term lockdown in reducing premature deaths. And the tipping point, they say, is a 6.4% decline in the size of the economy – on a par with what happened following the 2008 financial crash.

A 6.4% decline would see a loss of three months of life on average across the population,  because of factors such declining living standards and poorer health care. Accordingly, an  economic decline of that magnitude would eventually cost each of 4,900,000 New Zealanders a quarter of a year off their lifespans – the equivalent of 1,225,000 life years.

Will the Level 4 decision cause a 6.4% decline in New Zealand? The best available evidence is the independent opinion of the International Monetary Fund in their World Economic Outlook of April 2020. The IMF projections “show the depth of pain New Zealand’s economy will feel due to the coronavirus, forecasting a contraction of 7.2 per cent this year… The IMF believes New Zealand will see the biggest fall outside of Europe, except for Venezuela…”

So, we can now offer the first ever cost/benefit analysis for the Level 4 lockdown –

Cost:      1,225,000 life-years lost

Benefits:      1,835 life-years saved

This speaks for itself. It’s crude of course, but I’m confident it’s the best attempt that’s yet been published in this country. And it’s expressed in lives-vs-lives, which helps those slow commentators who can’t be bothered to understand any other currency.

Cost-benefit analyses that come before Cabinet are usually more sophisticated. For example, they would bring in the quality (quality-adjusted life-years or QALYs) as well as the quantity of lives lost and saved. They would recognise that some portion of the coming economic pain did not not flow solely from the Government’s determination to lead the world. They would resist New Zealand being bracketed with Venezuela. But the outcome would be much the same.

The mounting evidence that “the medicine is worse than the cure” (thanks, Simon) should not be a surprise for much longer. The development of serology-based tests is now revealing that Covid’s true infection-fatality-rate (IFR) could be a 0.2% – not significantly different from the seasonal ‘flu that we live with each year.    

This is part 1 of a 3 part series on the Coronavirus with part 2 being “Coronavirus – China v Taiwan” and Part 3 being “Coronavirus – New Zealand v Queensland”.

The US mainstream media, Democrats and left leaning allies are all pushing the narrative that Donald Trump’s dithering and incompetence has resulted in the coronavirus taking hold and multiplying through America causing more Americans to die than were killed in the Vietnam War. Foreign media, who globally mostly tilt to the left, have gleefully gone along with this. I have already covered how the media have distorted the figures to make COVID-19 in the US look worse than what it is and this is part of the strategy of trying to sheet home as much of the blame of the virus’ spread as possible on Trump. But how complicit is Trump in the spread of the virus through the US? Did his initial ambivalence lead to fatal delays as is alleged?

Trump made some pretty bold overly optimistic comments early on that were soon overtaken by events. But the truth is that his ambivalence was shared by almost all medical experts, media outlets usually hostile to Trump and his political opponents. In fact, it is the conduct of his political opponents (particularly in New York) that did more to spread the virus than anything Trump did or didn’t do. In the same month that Trump’s opponents accuse him of downplaying the significance of the virus, this is what a large number of key participants and Trump critics had to say at the same time about the risks of the virus:

Foremost medical expert

Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases – Dr. Anthony Fauci

Just as Ashley Bloomfield, Director General of Health in NZ, has become the well respected public face of the medical side of the virus response in NZ, so Anthony Fauci has been the most respected member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force and he has featured frequently and prominently in the President’s Press Conferences on virus related issues. Just like President Trump, Dr. Fauci has changed his views on the strength and likely spread of COVID-19 through the US.

21 January – Newsmax

In an interview, he said “this is not a major threat”

February 26, 2020 – CNBC

During an interview with CNBC he said, “Travel restrictions become almost irrelevant because you can’t keep out the entire world” and “When you have a pandemic that involves multiple countries, travel restrictions become almost irrelevant because you can’t keep out the entire world.”

February 25 – USA Today

In a briefing to USA Today he had this to say, “You need to do nothing different than you’re already doing,”. Other media around the same time reported that Fauci doesn’t want people to worry about coronavirus, the danger of which is “just minuscule.” But he does want them to take precautions against the “influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave.”

February 29 – NBC Today Show

Dr. Fauci claimed there was no need for Americans to “change anything what you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.” “Right now, at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis,” He said in response to a question about changing lifestyle habits. “Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change.”

March 12

By now, like Trump, Fauci’s rhetoric has switched and in contrast to his February 26 remarks, he said that he believed certain travel restrictions have “absolutely” helped with the prevention of the spread of the coronavirus. “I think it absolutely has,” Fauci said. “I believe if we did not do that with China early on …” Fauci also called the travel restriction involving Europe a “prudent choice.”

Prominent Democrats

Former Vice President Joe Biden – Frontrunner for Democrat Nomination for the 2020 Presidential Election

12 March – campaign rally

Biden attacks Trump over the 31 January flight restriction from China calling it racist and xenophobic.

Now with the virus well and truly ensconced in the US, Biden says he now supports President Trump’s decision to stop the flights from China.

Senator Bernie Sanders (Ind. – VT) – 2020 Democrat candidate for President

9^th March – Fox News Townhall

At the time, Sanders was the only other remaining major Democratic presidential candidate, and he conspicuously insisted at a Fox News town hall that he wouldn’t consider closing the U.S. border to prevent the spread of coronavirus as well as condemning what he called the president’s xenophobia.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi – US House of Representatives

February 24 – CBS affiliate KPIX San Francisco

Pelosi has been a vehement critic of Trump and his response and yet local San Francisco local TV station KPIX documented Pelosi’s visit to a fortune cookie factory and retailers: “we do want to say to people, ‘Come to Chinatown. Here we are. We’re careful, safe. Come join and  us.” and in another video, Pelosi told reporters, “Everything is fine here”:

New York Democrat Politicians

Given the massive coronavirus numbers in New York (and surrounding states) and how NY’s numbers have dramatically skewered figures for the whole US, it is instructive to look at the complacency bordering on negligence that was displayed by four prominent New York politicians.

New York Governor – Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo has become a darling of the media because of his press conferences and yet he has presided over the worse catastrophe in the US and indeed, NY’s per capita death rate is higher than any country in the world. Blasé attitudes and poor preparation were widespread amongst the leadership of the state and the city of New York. Here’s various comments Cuomo made in the same month he accuses Trump of negligence.

February 10 – Newsday

“We went through this before: Zika virus, Ebola, et cetera. But let’s have some connection to the reality of the situation, catching the flu right now is a much greater risk than anything that has anything to do with coronavirus.”

March 2 – Daily Press briefing
Governor Cuomo declared, “In this situation, the facts defeat fear, because the reality is reassuring. It is deep-breath time.” Discussing the fatality rate, he said, “1.4 percent, that’s extrapolating from China and other countries. 80 percent, it’ll resolve on their own. …. I get the emotion, I understand; I understand the anxiety. I’m a native-born New Yorker, we live with anxiety. But the facts don’t back it up here. . . . What happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries.”

New York City Mayor – Bill de Blasio

Mayor de Blasio was just as lax as Governor Cuomo

2 February – Press release 

“People should be very clear about what this disease is and what it isn’t, and New Yorkers, I always say, are not intimidated easily. New Yorkers should go about our lives, continue doing what we do. . .”

February 13 – MSNBC Morning Joe
He said, “We have an extraordinary public health apparatus here in New York City . . . and what became clear to me was it was really about telling the people of our city, this is something we can handle, but you got to follow some basic rules. . . . This should not stop you from going about your life. It should not stop you from going to Chinatown and going out to eat. I am going to do that today myself.”

March 2 – Twitter

De Blasio encourages New Yorkers to attend a movie.

Also, on the same day at a press conference with Gov. Cuomo he says “We have a lot of information now, information that is actually showing us things that should give us more reason to stay calm and go about our lives”

10 March – MSNBC

In this MSNBC interview, Mayor de Blasio appears very blasé encouraging “life to go on as normal”, “transmission not that easy”, that he’s “not shutting down our schools even if we find a case” and “we cannot shutdown due to undue fear”

March 11 – CNBC
During a press conference, Mayor de Blasio said “telling people to not avoid restaurants, not avoid normal things that people do. . . . If you’re not sick, you should be going about your life.” 

New York City’s Health Commissioner – Dr. Oxiris Barbot 

February 2 – Fox News

 “The risk to New Yorkers for Coronavirus is low, and our preparedness as a city is very high. There is no reason not to take the subway, not to take the bus, not to go out to your favorite restaurant, and certainly not to miss the parade next Sunday.”

March 1 – Twitter

“Despite this development, New York has remained at low risk for contracting COVID-19, as we confront this emerging outbreak”

March 2 – Twitter

Dr. Barbot tweeted, “As we gear up to celebrate the Lunar New Year in NYC, I want to assure New Yorkers that there is no reason for anyone to change their holiday plans, avoid the subway, or certain parts of the city because of coronavirus.”

March 4 – NYC Health Commission Daily Briefing
Dr. Barbot tells reporters, “There’s no indication that being in a car, being in the subways with someone who’s potentially sick is a risk factor, because, again, it goes back to the issue of casual contact.”

March 9 – Twitter

“Today our city is celebrating the lunar new year parade in Chinatown, beautiful culture tradition with a rich history in our city I want to remind everyone to enjoy the parade and not change any plans due to miss information about spreading coronavirus”

US Senator for New York – Chuck Schumer

And finally, the fourth high profile New York politician to be causal about Chinese New Year and social distancing back when few cases were reported was Senator Chuck Schumer (D – NY), another vehement critic of Trump and his so-called “lost month of February”.

5 February – Twitter

Schumer had this to say in February during Chinese New Year celebrations in New York City, “We love the fact that so many people come from all around the globe and make our city and our country a better place.”

Mainstream Media

Various outlets of the press who are habitually hostile to Trump were similarly indifferent to the impending disaster.

CNN

21 February

CNN were more concerned with racist attacks in the wake of the ban on entry from China

New York Times

February 18

With only 40 cases in NY state, the NYT looks at the mushrooming numbers in Europe and smugly preached and warned about racism and stigmatizing

Washington Post

January 31

In a perspective article, retired Harvard professor David Ropeik downplays the risk of the virus

February 1

The perception that the regular flu was a bigger threat than coronavirus was common back in February.

Vox

January 31

Left leaning Vox sent this tweet 2 days after the announcement of the formation of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force and the ban on foreign nationals coming to the US on flights from China and

Europe

The situation in Europe could easily be the subject of a separate post. Just as many prominent players in the US were complacent and underprepared for what was to come, the same could be said for virtually every European country with the possible exception of Germany.

At the EU level, as late as January 22^nd, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen took the main stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos to deliver a speech about climate change and digitalization and made zero mention of the coronavirus

On January 27, Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s center for disease control, told the broadcaster ZDF in an interview that he saw “low danger” from the coronavirus. “We expect that single cases in different countries can occur,” Wieler said. “The chance for those single cases to then spread is at this point limited.”

At the February 13 meeting in Brussels, the health ministers from EU countries received reassurance about Europe’s capacity to test for the coronavirus — a key requisite for controlling outbreaks. Andrea Ammon, the ECDC director, told them that Europe had adequate lab capacity and that the EU’s containment strategy was working.

In the end, only Germany seems to have been somewhat prepared because of its decentralized private sector driven testing regime, well-funded hospital system, more robust track and trace systems and Teutonic discipline in adhering to social distancing. Almost all the rest of Europe, their leaders regardless of political party were caught napping and the lack of preparedness led to huge per capita deaths. Britain dithered with its lock down, never controlled its border by testing or quarantining travelers from earlier infected countries like Italy and China and its centralized bureaucratic Public Health England meant testing took a long time to increase. Switzerland didn’t close its border with heavily infected northern Italy until too late, France never closed its borders with heavily infected Spain and Italy and infected foreigners kept coming in. France was woefully under prepared with inadequate numbers of masks and PPE. Belgium was even harder hit. The Netherlands was slow to implement social distancing. What happened to Italy and Spain could be the subject of its own post.

Conclusion

Whilst early on Trump fell into the same dismissive trap that many experts, politicians in the opposing political party and many leaders across the world, he had some institutional barriers of his own to overcome. Both the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were incredibly rule bound and thus very slow in approving new lab for testing and the lack of testing in the US in the early days of the virus was a factor in the growth and spread in the US. The MSM have been careful to avoid much mention of the fact that the Obama Administration had 7 years to replenish the 100 million N95 masks used up during the H1N1 or swine flu pandemic in 2009 which was a lot longer than the 3 years the Trump Administration had also waited. This made it difficult for the Federal government to support equipment needed in the states that had early large outbreaks such as California, Washington then New York and Michigan. Trump is to be commended for rallying private sector support for more masks, PPE and ventilator production and that, along with some selective use of his requisition powers under the Defense Production Act, saw production of these items to a level sufficient to cover the actual volume of patients admitted to hospitals and to ICUs. Such delays, deficiencies in testing, slow border closures, ineffective quarantining and slow production of PPE, masks and ventilators was a global problem and many countries with leaders of all political stripes were guilty of the same gaps in preparation and incorrect perceptions that Trump was guilty of.

It has been instructive to watch how the NZ media handle Jacinda Ardern versus how the US media handle Donald Trump. Let’s set aside some clear differences such as Trump’s more adversarial and at times bombastic style and Ardern’s rather more smooth, articulate and warm persona, there is really no getting away from the impact of the political leanings of each leader versus the leanings of the media covering them. Trump is a maverick who was not expected to win and has stepped on many establishment toes and whose decidedly more conservative policies run counter to the left leaning orientation of the MSM. Trump has responded to press opposition with unabashed reciprocal warfare and so both sides of this ‘conflict’ had battle lines drawn before the virus struck. It is increasingly clear that most of the US media are hell bent on defeating Trump and so the arrival of the virus with its game changing effect on society and the economy, rips out from underneath Trump one of his key electoral advantages, that of the previously strong and booming US economy that his policies have contributed towards. Sensing their opportunity to fatally wound Trump in the run-up to the November Presidential election, the MSM have taken the most negative and adversarial approach to anything Trump and his administration says or does concerning COVID-19.

Ardern faces the exact opposite situation. As a young, photogenic and charismatic progressive woman who already burnished her considerable PR skills with her response to the 15 March 2019 Christchurch Mosque shootings, she was already the subject of warm fuzzy global media attention. After the harsh lockdown and the subsequent low number of deaths (more on this in Part 3) and with her political leanings and persona in lock step with almost all the media, Ardern faces a deferential, polite and even at times supine press corps in NZ bolstered by numerous puff pieces from her left leaning fan bois and girls across the globe. While Congressional Democrats have politicised almost everything they could around this virus and used their power to obstruct and cause maximum embarrassment for Trump to further the chances of Joe Biden in beating Trump, it has been the opposite in New Zealand which also faces an imminent election and yet the body politic there seems to deal so much better in national emergencies with Simon Bridges and National giving Ardern and the coalition government a good degree of bi-partisan support on the decided upon course of action in much the same way the Labour opposition did with John Key’s National led government during the Pike River mine disaster and the Christchurch earthquakes. Much of the negative commentary of Trump needs to be seen through this almost hostile partisan lens that the media have fueled and hopefully the core Democrat message that Trump dithered and people died is counterbalanced by the knowledge that many of his advisers and opponents were equally at sea but that the such inaction on the part of key New York politicians played a part in the virus taking hold and spreading so deep and fast in New York and, contrary to media reporting, that outcome cannot be solely sheeted home to Trump – many of his loudest opponents can have much more blame apportioned to them than ever to Trump. It is sad that the desire to defeat Trump trumps even an international tragedy as huge and consequential as the coronavirus and New Zealanders, regardless of the eventual merits and long term economic impact of NZ’s policy response, at least the people, the politicians and the media there are somewhat united behind a common goal.