Holding our covid nerve

A lot has happened in the past half week with covid in New Zealand. I’ve barely kept up, relying on social media and news headlines while I’ve been distracted by other things. The main message I’ve had has been fairly chaotic with an undertone of panic (and some bullshit narratives from the international MSM). Last night I finally sat down and listened to the 4pm press conference from Monday, and discovered that it was coherent and consistent with Labour and the Ministry of Health’s plans, and that it made sense.

Here’s what I heard from Ardern and Bloomfield,

  1. We haven’t been able to eliminate the Auckland outbreak with existing tools, largely because of the nature of the delta variant.
  2. The longer term plan had been to transition to less reliance on lockdowns, once most New Zealanders were vaccinated.
  3. The delta outbreak has brought this strategy forward, but it’s still an ongoing process with a lot of uncertainty.
  4. At this point the focus is on Auckland and helping the city transition out of Level Three, but we have parallel transitions: Auckland now down through the levels, New Zealand as a whole over a longer time where vaccination replaces lockdowns as a primary tool.
  5. To do this, we need to keep on vaccinating as many people as possible.
  6. The government will continue to do the same things it did with the elimination strategy, now and in the future: comprehensive testing, contact tracing, genome sequencing, managed isolation and quarantine, and various levels of lockdown as needed.
  7. The government is also adapting around the persistence of the Auckland Delta outbreak, being realistic about people’s ability to maintain the necessary behaviours under hard lockdowns. It intends to do weekly pause and assess of the plan as it monitors the situation.

So we know that elimination is probably no longer possible in an absolute sense at thist stage, but that we will keep doing as much as humanly possible to stamp out infections and contain covid outbreaks while getting as many people vaccinated as possible.

There are still a lot of unknowns. We’ve seen some recent modelling about hospital overload and covid deaths even with a 90% vax rate (not a lot yet about long covid but this conversation is starting). We don’t know how this will play out in real life, nor what the nationwide transition to whatever the next phase is will look like. It’s much clearer now that we should prepare for covid deaths, long covid, and pressures on the health system, it’s more an issue of to what degree. I can’t see any way that this can be predicted.

It’s also very clear that this is not a strategy of let covid into the community and let vulnerable people look after themselves. And while I am sure that economics is a major factor for Labour, it’s also not a strategy of economy over people which is what we would have if NACT were in power.

I remain doubtful about border reopening to anything like what we had pre-pandemic, and I think the idea that the vaccine would mean never having another Level 4 lockdown is naive. But I do still by and large trust Labour despite them not being perfect in the face of the biggest challenge New Zealand has faced in our lifetimes. And, critically, I trust them despite them not doing what I want (abandoning neoliberalism and embracing social justice, sustainability and resiliency). Our success isn’t that dependent upon on us all agreeing.

Uncertainty is the name of the game, or one of them. Adaptability is another. That it’s not working out perfectly doesn’t mean we or the government are failing. What I think we need more of at this point is stories about ‘what if things work out’.  Not in a Pollyanna or return to BAU sense, we’re probably not going to get what we want. But we can still be ok and we need strong narratives of what that might be like, us being ok despite the pandemic.

I was pleased to hear Bloomfield point out that most people in Auckland, and New Zealand, are adhering to lockdown rules without any oversight or enforcement. It’s just a beautiful reframing in the middle of a press conference focused on things not going well.

Also pleasing was Ardern reiterating that vulnerable groups such as Māori remain a high priority in the vaccination programme and that this isn’t a passive process, it’s about actively going out to those communities and doing the mahi to make it work. There’s something here about how encouragement can lift spirits as well as open doors to hesitant or distracted people. What reaches people and calls them in?

My personal hope remains that we step up and take advantage of the opportunities the pandemic offers us as the opening to climate transition. We are inundated with so many stressful and scary messages about the state of the world, let’s not forget we can also ask What could possibly go right?

This from Judith Schwartz in that post, regarding climate change but could equally apply to our covid life,

… I want to speak to the brilliance and importance of that question, because it’s a question we tend not to ask. Yet we need to ask that question, perhaps more now than ever, because if we can’t envision what we want, what we wish for, what we aspire to, then how are we ever going to get there? So I think that what we have been dealing with, to a large extent, is a lack of imagination and creativity. So let’s open up that creativity.

…

I felt a disconnect between the hope and excitement of people who are engaged in regenerative agriculture and different kinds of ecosystem restoration projects, and people who don’t know that this is going on, who say we’re doomed and don’t know where to put their energy. So I wanted to make that connection to say, Hey, we are where we are, and we need to accept that, and accept that we don’t know where things are going. But let’s look at where we do have agency. In particular, let’s look at where we have more agency than we think we do…

The bigger conversation here, the one that requires courage, and the one that New Zealand should be having, is what is the balance point between preventing death and disability, and maintaining quality of economic and social life? I don’t want us to leave this to a default position arising from Labour, the opposition and the MSM hashing it out.

The deeper conversation is what kind of lives do we want to be living given the constraints we will have to live with going forward. Not just the deaths vs economics equation we’ve been avoiding (thankfully) the whole pandemic, but what does quality of life look like now and in the future? What do we want it to look like?

We all should have a say in this.

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