The announcement this week that New Zealand will introduce a vaccination certificate by November is welcome news. Whether by “carrot” or “stick”, vaccination rates must keep climbing, as it is now likely case numbers will climb under alert level 3 conditions in Auckland.

We’ve seen a growing number of mystery cases over the past couple of weeks – people testing positive after going to hospital for non-covid reasons, or from essential worker surveillance testing.

These cases suggest there is a significant amount of undetected community transmission, and that makes it much harder to stamp out.

While the slight easing of restrictions announced on Tuesday may or may not accelerate the growth in cases, it is unlikely to slow it.

This has led to some debate about whether the government has abandoned its elimination strategy in favour of suppression of cases.

To some extent this is a semantic argument. Elimination has been defined as “zero tolerance” for community transmission, as opposed to zero cases. The fact that New Zealand was able to get to zero cases for much of the past 18 months has inevitably come to define what elimination has meant in practice.

Before vaccines were widely available, having zero cases was crucial in allowing us to enjoy level 1 freedoms.

But New Zealand is now transitioning into a new phase of the pandemic, and this was always going to happen. Borders can’t remain closed forever and the virus was always going to arrive sooner or later.

Return to tougher restrictions still a possibility
In an ideal world, our border defences would have kept delta out and New Zealand would have been able to stay at alert level 1 until the vaccine rollout was complete.

But the delta outbreak has forced our hand to some extent.

Whether another week or two at level 4 would have been enough to eliminate this outbreak is impossible to know. Given the outbreak is spreading in very difficult-to-reach communities, stamping out every chain of transmission is extremely challenging.

As we shift from an elimination to a suppression strategy, the country will have to tread a very narrow path to avoid overwhelming our hospitals and throwing our at-risk populations under the bus.

This includes Māori and Pasifika, who were effectively put at the back of the vaccine queue by dint of their younger populations, despite being at higher risk of severe covid-19.

We are now relying on a combination of restrictions and immunity through vaccination to prevent cases growing too rapidly. As vaccination rates increase, restrictions can be progressively eased.

But if we relax too much, there is a risk the number of hospitalisations could start to spiral out of control. When the R number is above 1, cases will continue to grow relentlessly until either more immunity or tougher restrictions bring it back under 1.

Getting vaccination rates up is crucial but will take time, so the government may yet be forced to tighten restrictions to protect our healthcare systems.

The vaccination advantage
New Zealand was always going to have to grapple with these really tough decisions, though delta has forced us to do this earlier than we would have liked.

But our elimination strategy has given us has an important advantage – almost 70 percent of the total population has had at least one dose of the vaccine before experiencing any large-scale community transmission.

We still have a lot of work ahead, but having access to the vaccine before being exposed to the virus is a luxury people in most countries didn’t have.

There is a lot that could happen between now and Christmas. Currently, the Australian state of Victoria has more than 100 people in intensive care, which is equivalent to almost a third of New Zealand’s total ICU capacity.

Those ICU beds are normally full with patients with conditions other than covid-19.

The implications for the healthcare system are obvious. If New Zealand goes the way of Melbourne, harsher restrictions will probably be inevitable.

Not a white flag
The more optimistic scenario is that a combination of restrictions, vaccination and contact tracing is just enough to keep a lid on the case numbers. It’s almost inevitable cases will increase. But if it isn’t too rapid and hospitals can meet the demand, it could tide us over until we have the high vaccine coverage we need.

And while vaccination rates are not yet high enough, they are still helping a lot, cutting the R number to around half what it would be with no vaccine.

The country is in a far better position now than it would have been if the Auckland outbreak had happened in May or June.

Everyone can do their bit by doing two things: help and encourage those around you to get vaccinated, and stick to the rules.

We have to keep community transmission rates low to keep pressure off our hospitals and help us get to the next step of the road map. Moving away from a literal interpretation of elimination does not mean waving a white flag.

Dr Michael Plank, professor in applied mathematics, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

On August 17, a 58-year-old man from Auckland became symptomatic and tested positive for covid-19. It was New Zealand’s first community case of the coronavirus in almost six months.

Within hours, the nation of five million moved into alert level four, part of its “go hard, go early” approach. All travel outside of people’s homes was forbidden, except to fetch supplies, visit pharmacies or exercise.

The country largely ground to a halt.

“We have seen the dire consequences of taking too long to act in other countries, not least our neighbours,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, while announcing the cabinet’s decision to impose a lockdown that evening.

Within a few days, one case had grown to 21 cases. After a week, to 148 cases. By August 31, the cluster contained 612 cases.

Snap lockdown
One month after imposing the snap lockdown, New Zealand has bent the curve and may be able to eliminate an outbreak of the potent delta variant of COVID-19 – though it is no sure thing.

As of September 20, some 1051 people in Auckland and 17 people in the capital city, Wellington, have been infected with the virus, of whom 694 have recovered.

Contact tracers have methodically identified tens of thousands of contacts – and hundreds of locations of interest – part of an updated track-and-trace system repurposed to cast a much wider net around the far more transmissible delta variant.

The outbreak, now spread across 20 subclusters, 10 of which have been epidemiologically linked, presents the most serious challenge to elimination that New Zealand has faced so far. With its fragmented public health system under intense strain from decades of under-funding, any unchecked spread of the delta variant would see hospitals rapidly overwhelmed.

But New Zealanders rallied behind the restrictions, sticking to their “bubbles”, masking up and watching patiently as cases peaked, then began to decline – though the outbreak’s tail is proving persistent.

If the country does eliminate this outbreak, it would once again validate the “go hard, go early” approach that officials have taken over the past 18 months.

With Auckland moving yesterday to the more permissive alert level three, case numbers over the coming weeks will be closely watched for any sign of uncontained spread.

Entitlement and denunciation
Yet, as with previous outbreaks, the clamour from critics of the government started almost immediately, a chorus of whinge.

Business special interests laundered their messaging through an uncritical media – “certainty” they chanted, while pressuring for a move down alert levels.

“We also know that in lockdown Treasury has forecast it to cost the country NZ$1.45 billion per week – and that’s just the economic impact,” Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Leeann Watson told broadcaster Newstalk ZB.

Incredibly, less than a week into lockdown, Export New Zealand executive director Catherine Beard complained to Stuff, the country’s most popular news website, that the business environment was getting “tough” for exporters, while lobbying for more managed isolation spots for business travellers – or self-isolation.

“Some of these are multimillion-dollar deals, so the situation is very stressful,” she said.

Some in the hospitality sector complained about limits on gatherings and threatened to withhold tax, while demanding “targeted” assistance from the government.

“Now it’s 100 percent [Ministry of] Health running the show,” said Hospitality New Zealand chief executive Julie White, according to Stuff. “No one is advising them commercially.”

Most New Zealanders would, presumably, prefer that the Health Ministry – as opposed to hospitality interest groups – responds to the threat presented by a lethal, airborne pathogen.

‘Glacial’ pace criticised
The “glacial” pace of the country’s vaccine rollout was also riffed off in headline after headline.

Perhaps, as the political opposition and reporters contend, the rollout has been “sluggish”.

Perhaps the government could have instructed the medical regulator Medsafe to conduct a less rigorous assessment of the Pfizer vaccine, under emergency protocols.

“Another [possibility] is,” Craig McCulloch, Radio New Zealand’s deputy political editor speculated, “that the government’s negotiators came late to the party, did a poor job and got a raw deal.”

Or perhaps soaring global demand amid the pandemic, Pfizer’s finite ability to supply vaccines to a vast suite of countries and New Zealand’s limited purchasing power and largely covid-free status explains the “delay”.

Certainly, the World Health Organisation has described vaccine hoarding by wealthy nations as approaching a “catastrophic moral failure”.

When Pfizer became able to deliver large shipments midway through July, New Zealand saw a dramatic scale-up in the vaccination programme, as officials had promised for months.

Rollout a success story
If anything, the nation’s rollout — a massive logistical undertaking — has largely been a success story, conducted in an environment of incredible uncertainty and reliant upon an already stretched workforce.

It has additionally played a key role in supporting vaccination efforts in the Cook Islands.

As of September 20, some 4,711,410 doses of the vaccine have been administered, tracking close to supply, with 1,618,673 people now fully vaccinated.

Amid the rising racket, the entitlement and denunciation, even commentators from abroad got in on the act.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson — agitating anti-lockdown sentiment — suggested that New Zealand provided a model for how his viewers would be subjugated by Joe Biden’s administration.

“How far can they go? […] A single covid case in New Zealand, not a death from covid, but a case of covid has shut down the entire country.”

Writing in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, one commentator called the outbreak “poetic justice” and claimed a “once-welcoming nation is turning into an isolated dystopia, where liberties are taken away in a heartbeat and outsiders are shunned”.

While these criticisms are couched in the language of defending civil liberties, they reduce to variants of the “learn to live with covid” argument.

Or put another way: “The cure cannot be worse than the disease”.

The economy must reign supreme, after all.

Sound familiar?

‘Needles in my eyes’
New Zealand’s elimination strategy relies on public buy-in. Recent polling shows that some 84 percent of the public supports the latest lockdown.

As with previous outbreaks, Ardern has used clear, empathetic language to reassure and unify an often politically divided nation. These briefings are held in Parliament’s theatrette and usually feature the Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield.

For many in New Zealand, the daily press briefings provide a detailed window into how authorities manage outbreaks and have been the most visible key to the elimination strategy’s success.

“To all Aucklanders, you have done an amazing job so far protecting yourselves, your family and your community,” Ardern said on September 13, while announcing that Auckland would stay in alert level four for another week. “We owe you a huge debt of gratitude … but the cases are telling us we have additional work to do.”

Voters rewarded Ardern’s Labour Party for this kind of humane approach and its exceptional management of the viral threat in the national elections last October, granting it an outright majority.

The political opposition judges these briefings a political threat, and routinely denigrates them as Ardern speaking from “The Podium of Truth”.

With the return of daily briefings on August 17, right-wing broadcasters and some journalists began to deride the briefings, at exactly the moment when trust in the authorities needed to be reinforced.

Undermining public perceptions
There is a difference between “holding power to account” and deliberately attempting, for purely partisan political reasons, to undermine public perceptions that the covid-19 response is being well managed.

“I tried, I really did, but I wanted to stick needles in my eyes by about four minutes in,” said Newstalk ZB’s Kate Hawkesby, the day after the return of the 1pm press conferences. “I’d forgotten how soul-destroying it is to be spoken to like a three-year-old.”

On the same station, Hawkesby’s husband, Mike Hosking, overdubbed turkey “gobbles” and truck horn sound effects onto an interview recorded with Associate Health Minister Dr Ayesha Verrall.

Newstalk ZB’s political editor, Barry Soper, in a report about an Auckland man whose kidney surgery was postponed due to staffing shortages, loaded his story’s preamble with phrases like “their altar” and “practise what they preach”.

He also issued a remarkable dog-whistle to New Zealand’s far-right, the kind of people who believe Ardern – a fairly mild political centrist – is turning the country into a “communist dictatorship”.

“If you have ever wondered what it must have been like to live in a totalitarian state, then perhaps wonder no more.”

This nonsense went on and on.

Moaning media
Some press gallery reporters began to complain about the length of Ardern’s introductions, while Jason Walls, a political reporter with Newstalk ZB, took to Twitter to moan about Dr Bloomfield saying “finally” two times.

This speaks to how the media has fundamentally misunderstood what the briefings are: public service announcements.

They are for the public. Reporters are invited as a check and, as such, should resist the urge to demand a say in how these announcements are structured.

Even The New York Times managed to launder messaging that targeted the briefings, quoting former National Party staffer and political commentator Ben Thomas – who appears fixated on denigrating Dr Bloomfield.

“He [Dr Bloomfield] has … a cult-like following,” said Thomas. “The country has a huge kind of parasocial devotion to him, which is very new to New Zealand.”

Apparently, Thomas has not heard of Michael Joseph Savage, who founded New Zealand’s welfare state in the 1930s and whose framed photo hung in homes throughout the country for decades.

Regardless, all of this is a fairly obvious partisan political effort, driven by both ideology and market dynamics.

Many reporters and commentators at New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME), which owns The New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB, seem unable to accept that their preferred political tribe is no longer in power.

More critically, in an age where the news media increasingly attempts to attract subscribers by catering to their social and political values, NZME appears to be ring-fencing centre-to-far-right eyeballs.

It is, essentially, becoming New Zealand’s Fox News.

A brave new world
The sense in New Zealand is that this may be the last of the nation’s sledgehammer-style lockdowns, though one hopes officials do not retire lockdowns altogether.

The goal is to get as many people as possible vaccinated, assess the impact of opening up, and then tentatively start easing some border restrictions, if possible.

No doubt, certain industries – tourism, hospitality, horticulture, media – will continue to apply relentless pressure.

Yet, when the nation reconnects more fully to the networks of global trade and travel, the super-highways of hyper-globalisation that have spread disease and death around the world, when the inevitable outbreaks come, there will be a toll.

Glen Johnson is an independent New Zealand journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for 11 years, predominantly out of the Middle East and North Africa. His work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Seattle Times, Vice, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Reuters, Le Monde Diplomatique, Balkan Insight, Al Jazeera and The New Zealand Herald, among others. His article was first published by Al Jazeera English and is republished with the permission of the author.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

There is something decidedly sinister about the way the right-wing media is pursuing the “elimination strategy is madness” argument so doggedly. Yes, it’s always interesting to discover what people are saying about New Zealand overseas, but The New Zealand Herald republishing anti-Jacinda Ardern editorials from the Daily Telegraph — mouthpiece of the British Conservative Party — points to an altogether more disturbing preoccupation.

These misgivings are only reinforced when one considers the near unanimous hostility directed towards the Prime Minister and her government by New Zealand’s talkback hosts.

At the most superficial level, one could argue that the right-wing media’s editorial hostility is generated almost entirely by bottomline anxieties. With most of its advertising revenue generated by realtors, retailers, the hospitality industry and tourist operators, the big media outlets must experience significant financial pain whenever New Zealand and/or its most important economic hub, Auckland, goes into lockdown.

The pressure brought to bear on the media bosses to get the doors open for their advertisers’ paying customers is easily imagined.

More than anything else, commercial enterprises hate surprises. Certainty and predictability are what they need to go on generating profits for their shareholders. The sudden appearance of covid-19 in the community, followed by lockdowns of a severity to make the eyes of overseas commentators water, bring with them consequences that are costly, disruptive and generally bad for business.

Unsurprisingly, a significant fraction of the business community would very much prefer that covid-19 was responded to in a fashion less injurious to their financial health.

Those business leaders less bound by the short-term selfishness of their colleagues take a more responsible position. They understand how very bad it looks for businesspeople to convey the impression that they care a great deal less about people getting very ill, and quite possibly dying, than they do about making money.

Short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns
They also know that New Zealand’s style of short, sharp, uncompromising lockdowns protect the economic interests of the business community a whole lot more effectively than the loose, dangerously porous, lockdowns on display in the UK, the USA, and across the Tasman in Australia.

Not that anything as mundane as “the facts of the matter” have ever slowed the government’s critics down. Neither New Zealand’s extraordinary success in keeping the number of covid-19 deaths below 30, nor the powerful bounce-back of its economy, cuts any ice with the “elimination strategy is madness” brigade. Indeed, the obvious success of Jacinda Ardern’s elimination strategy only seems to make them madder.

So what is it? What drives Ardern’s critics so crazy?

Sadly, a great many of her right-wing opponents seem to be inspired by nothing more edifying than sexist antipathy towards a young, female prime minister, from a tiny and powerless country at the bottom of the world, who has outperformed (by a wide margin) the male leaders of much larger and more powerful nations.

Something about this picture is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Young women are supposed to defer to the “big dogs” of the international community — not show them up. Ardern has produced a disturbance in the conservative “Force” that makes them shudder: as if an entire political ideology suddenly cried out in indignation and was rudely silenced.

They fear something terrible is going on.

And, in a way, they’re right. From the perspective of those responsible for creating a world in which the interests of business take precedence over even the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well (some might say especially over the ordinary person’s right to stay safe and well) the sight of a young, female prime minister putting the interests of ordinary people first is a terrible thing.

Ardern’s “kindness” works way beyond neoliberalism’s explanation
Because Jacinda Ardern’s “kindness” doesn’t just work a little bit, it works way beyond neoliberalism’s capacity to supply a credible explanation.

Take Sweden, for example. For a while it was the “who needs lockdowns?” brigade’s poster child. But Sweden, with just twice the population of New Zealand, racked-up a horrifying 14,000+ covid fatalities. Had Ardern followed the Swedish prime minister’s example, her country would have sustained upwards of 7,000 deaths.

By following its leader’s strict elimination strategy, however, New Zealand’s “Team of Five Million” kept their country’s covid death toll to 26.

On the Right, however, this sort of science-guided, humanitarian response to covid-19 just doesn’t compute. Conservatives around the world react by accusing Ardern of political cowardice. She simply doesn’t have the balls to adopt a strategy that will lead directly to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths.

Look at the Brits; look at the Yanks; they had the courage to condemn tens-of-thousands of their people to early and unnecessary deaths; they know that “you can’t live in a cave forever”; that, in the end, the economy must come first.

This is the upside-down world towards which the right-wing media’s wayward editorial decisions are dragging its readers, viewers and listeners. A world in which saving New Zealanders’ lives is the wrong thing to do. A world where “freedom” means nothing more than being able to go shopping wherever and whenever you want – without a mask.

That the big media companies haven’t quite arrived there yet is because there are still some executives who understand that, ultimately, the news media relies on ordinary people to read its copy and listen to its broadcasters’ opinions.

Ordinary people who, if right-wing editors and producers ever get around to actually swallowing the insanity-inducing Kool-Aid swishing about in their mouths, will be offered-up to deranged conservatives (and the advertisers) as unavoidable human sacrifices to the Moloch god of the free market.

The only elimination strategy the right-wing media will ever wholeheartedly support.

This essay, by Chris Trotter, was originally posted on the Bowalley Road blog of Thursday, 26 August 2021, under the title: “A Disturbing Preoccupation: Why the Right-Wing Media Hates Jacinda’s Covid Elimination Strategy”.  It is republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of the author.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz