Moving Down

The government has announced that New Zealand will move to Level 3 and relax the lockdown slightly on Tuesday 28 April (Monday is a statutory holiday). Given that the infections have not yet been eliminated, although the border is shut quite tight, the success of this decision will depend on two things.

1. Quickly testing all possible new infections to determine if they have the virus and quarantining them.

2. Tracing all the contacts of each new infection and successfully isolating all their contacts.

The Ministry of Health struggled with both task when the virus emerged, so I hope their capability has significantly improved.

• During the early days of the virus, testing seemed to be quite limited. They now seem to have got testing capability all over the country, so they should be okay with testing. The problem is that experience in other nations suggest that with Covid19, there might be considerable numbers of asymptomatic infections that are spreading the virus within the community. If this is the situation in New Zealand, these will not be picked up by testing and the virus could continue to spread (previously, they were in a bubble).

• The tracing capability is more worrying. Very little information has been released, but it seems that in the early stages, they struggled with tracing, due to insufficient people being trained, and out-dated IT infrastructure. They seem to have caught up now that the numbers of infections has declined, but this does not inspire confidence.

  The claimed target for the Public Health Units is to contact 80% within three days of an infection being diagnosed. The problem is that three days after being diagnosed, if they were infectious before their symptoms emerged, the people they have infected could already be infecting others before they are contacted.

These concerns mean that the shift to Level 3 is not without risk.

Deciding to go to Level 3 next week was a tough decision. Only God has enough information, to know what was the right thing to do, but I doubt that the Prime Minister asked him. I wish that she had a Nathan, or Elisha to counsel her.