Vocal Voices

New Zealand was highly praised for its approach to the pandemic and largely remained free of Covid. Quick and strong lockdowns and closing travel meant that Kiwis largely escaped the long drawn out restrictions handed down to many of us.

How things have changed!

Following one, yes just one, new case the whole country has gone into total lockdown - everybody unless essential to keep the country's infrastructure running stays home. This cannot go on.

Covid will be with us for a very long time and NZ cannot stay locked away from the world forever - certainly not with its current actions. At some point NZ will have to open up and when that day arrives it will suffer just like the rest of us, only years later. Australia is also discovering this simple fact.

Both countries have vaccination rates well below average and until they catch up they are vulnerable.

Lockdowns are not the answer
Masks are not the answer
Hand sanitisers are not the answer.

We have learned ALL these things over the last 18 months.

Vaccines are part of the answer.

So what is the answer? Well part of the answer is that, just like Influenza, Covid-19 is here to stay. It is going to infect people and kill people every single year. Vaccinations and boosters will reduce the deaths and the hospitalisations to a minimum. As will pre infected people.

The whole answer is that just like Influenza we're going to have to learn to live with Covid-19 for the foreseeable future. NZ and OZ seem to have missed the memo. They will, eventually, learn. Until then politics rules and common sense goes out the window.

Absolutely agree, it's ridiculous Just get everyone vaccinated.

Suff wrote:Lockdowns are not the answer
Masks are not the answer
Hand sanitisers are not the answer.

But they all played their part - eventually.

Going quick and going hard does not now look to have paid off in the longer term. This is what some of us were saying at the time and Taiwan, NZ, Oz and Vietnam etc. are now finding out.

There was never a text book answer, but the middle way - lockdowns and restrictions - with vaccines, looks to have been the most successful one.

Covid cannot be kept out, we have to learn to live with it.

Workingman wrote:

Suff wrote:Lockdowns are not the answer
Masks are not the answer
Hand sanitisers are not the answer.

But they all played their part - eventually.

They played their part in holding back the very worst of the virus until we could get volume vaccinations out there.

Once we have everyone vaccinated they need to go away and we need to get back to normal. I'm not promising nobody will die and that vaccinations are 100% effective. But I am promising that even if double vaccinated and even if using hand sanitiser until your skin shrivels up and even if you wear a mask all day every day, those who are the most susceptible will become infected unless they live in a sterile tent like the critically immune deficient.

The thing is that for the places mentioned they are going to have to come out of their tent eventually and when they do life will be tough simply because they have not had the exposure to Covid that the rest of us have.

They cannot keep Covid out indefinitely no matter how hard they try. It will get in and then they are going to have to deal with it in a different way than at present.

I don't understand why the vaccine roll out in Australia and New Zealand is so slow?

I agree, you can't keep it out, and zero covid can't be achieved. The minute someone comes into the country who has it, you're back to square one.

There will come a time when the world has to accept Covid is with us: there is no escape.

The places mentioned will eventually have to open up or die, economically. They might have done well in the first wave, but in the future?

Everyone who did well in the first wave thought they had cracked it and were in the middle of congratulating themselves when the virus did what viruses do and simply kicked off again.

Right at the very beginning we were told that there was no getting out of this without a vaccine. That message seems to have been lost along the way with all the lockdowns and the justifications for the lockdowns. All the scare stories and the attempt to direct the people into a different way of thinking.

Perhaps if we had kept that mantra all the way through, Anti Vaxers would have got the message and expectations would have been correctly set.

No Vaccine, No exit.

Governments would then have been judged on their progress to a vaccine fully deployed and not on how well they told the people that they would have to lock down and take restrictions on their lives (Sturgeon take a bow).

I see NZ is having to change tack because of the Delta variant. Cases have jumped from one to 72 and there are worries.

Covid-19 response minister Chris Hipkins;

"The reality is that a virus that can be infectious within 24 hours of someone getting it - that changes the game considerably," he told the televised Q+A political talk show on Sunday.

"It does mean that all of our existing protections... start to look less adequate and less robust," he said, adding that it raises "some pretty big questions about what the long-term future of our plans are".

"At some point we will have to start to be more open in the future."

And PM Ardhern has said that national borders will remain closed until the end of this year. The aim was to vaccination the population by then, after that the country would move to a new individual risk-based model for quarantine-free travel.

This was always going to be the case for everywhere no matter what was done in the first year or so.