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.

Data Decides?

According to the headline of an article published this morning by a data journalist about when New Zealand will move out the lockdown, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, “The data will decide”. I presume that she did not actually say that, because it is quite a stupid statement. I spent thirty years of my working career working with data, and I never saw a piece of data make a decision about anything.

People make decisions, not data. A person can use data to help them make a decision, but it must be done carefully. Often, there will be numerous data series that are relevant to a decision, and they sometimes give a conflicting message, because they measure slightly different things.

The decision-maker must analyse the data to know how each piece of data was measured and how reliable it is. They need to understand what the data is indicating. Has the trend actually changed, or are the last few observations just random noise?

Usually there will be various data sources that are relevant to a decision, and often the data that is really needed is not available, or not up-to-date. The decision-maker has to decide how much weight to each piece of data, which is a human judgment. Using data wisely takes a great deal of wisdom.

The decision-maker needs to understand the context behind the data. Information about numbers of new Covid19 infections only means something in the context of an understanding of epidemiology (how viruses transmit), knowledge of geography (where infected people live), and psychology (how they will behave).

So, I hope the leaders making the decision about the lockdown will use the data wisely. I also hope that they will understand that they are making the judgement and must be accountable for their decision.

Data rarely supports a decision one way clearly, so the people deciding usually need a great deal of wisdom and insight. Of course, the benefit of claiming that the data will make the decision is that if the decision turns out to be wrong, they can blame the data.

A problem with politicians is that tend to use data badly to justify their decisions and sometimes to scare people into complying with their them. An example is the Prime Minister’s claim that if a severe lockdown was not introduced, 8000 to 13000 people would die. It has now emerged that those numbers came from a Covid19 model that was poorly specified. The same model produced an estimate of 500, when more plausible parameters were used. The big numbers were a worst-case scenario that was unlikely to happen. Although unreliable, they were used to scare people into complying with the lockdown.

A piece of data that we need to be careful about is the results of the community surveillance testing. 300 people have been fairly randomly tested in a Christchurch supermarket (and in a couple of other towns) to determine if there is significant community spread. The problem with this is that sample surveys are useful for measuring something that is quite common in society (ie support for large political parties), but they are not very useful establishing that something is missing from a population, (ie community spread of a virus).

There are 300,000 people living in Christchurch. If there are ten people wandering around the city with undetected Covid19, that is only one in 30,000. The probability that one of these ten would be at the Moorhouse Avenue supermarket (let alone be selected for testing) is negligible. So the surveillance testing will almost certainly not find any undetected infections, but that does not mean that none exist. A surveillance survey would need a vastly larger sample to determine that.

However, I presume that the information from the surveillance surveys will be used by politicians to make people feel safer about any decision to relax the lockdown, just as an exaggerated death toll was used to persuade people into staying at home.

What is Going On

Covid19 has shaken up the world. Christians are wondering what is going on. Here are my thoughts.

We must be clear about one thing. The source of the virus is not God.

Spiritual Powers of Evil
The spiritual powers of evil are trying something that they have done before: generate something evil and leave it to see where it goes and how much damage it does. They are able to do this in places where humans have given them authority to work on earth.

The virus will eventually burn out; quicker if a vaccine can be developed. However, because their efforts have successfully disrupted human life, the spiritual powers of evil will have another go when they think the time is right.

The last 70 years have been a time of relative peace and quiet in the western world. This has given us a false sense of security. This comfort has been an effective tactic for the spiritual powers of evil, because it has resulted in a complete lack awareness of the spiritual realms, and particularly their evil activities. In many western nations, this lack of awareness has been made worse by the large number of people that have turned away from God.

The spiritual powers of evil are not content with distracting people from God. They love to steal, kill and destroy. They will have a go at achieving this whenever they get an opportunity.

The spiritual powers of evil have had a few fizzers with Sars and Ebola, but this one has been really successful, partly because of the human response, so they will try it again; but possibly not straight away. They will probably try again with something else that they have found successful first, but they will try an epidemic again, and it will probably be worse.

I suspect the third and four horsemen were taking their horses (Black Horse and Pale Horse) out for a brief trot to see if they are fit, but this was not the big one.

Many people hope that the situation will return to normal soon.

Things will not return to normal.
This is not a new normal.
It will not even be a new normal adjusted.
We are returning to an old normal
where life is uncertain,
as it is for most people in the third world
and was for most of human history.
We are returning to the old normal
where the world was wrecked by frequent epidemics
that get ahead of human efforts to control them.

God
God did not cause this disease. And he cannot stop it in places where he has been squeezed out and not been given authority to intervene.

God is using the virus to expose the flaw in the modern way of doing church, by demonstrating that it is not viable during a crisis. God wants his people to be prepared, so his people can continue to be effective in sharing the gospel and expanding his kingdom, regardless of what is happening in the world. God has promised to establish his kingdom on earth, but it will likely have its greatest advance during tough times. He needs his people to be prepared for crisis, and equipped for victory.

Covid19 and the Prophetic Movement

Having written a book about the Prophetic ministry, I monitor the Elijah List and other prophetic bulletin boards to get an understanding of what is happening. I sense that the Covid19 virus has exposed the weakness of the prophetic movement. There have been some really encouraging words, but on the whole, I have been disappointed by some of what I have read.

No warning
Around the new year, people with prophetic gifts give their prognostications for the coming years. As far as I can see, none of them predicted the trauma of the coronavirus. Many spoke about 2020 being a year for 20/20 vision, which ironically means the vision of an average person) and a time of increased blessing on God’s people. If they were unable to give a warning of the most dramatic event to strike the world since the GFC, then something is not right with the movement.

A couple of prophetic ministers seems to have given warning of a severe virus several years ago, but these references were quite oblique. They must have been uncertain about what they were describing, because the did not make a big deal of it.

The clearest warning seems to have been given by David Wilkerson back in 1986.

I see a plague coming on the world, and the bars and churches and government will shut down. The plague will hit New York City and shake it like it has never been shaken. The plague is going to force prayerless Believers into radical prayer and into their Bibles, and repentance will be the cry from the man of God in the pulpit. And out of it will come a third Great Awakening that will sweep America and the world.

Unfortunately, this warning has been forgotten, if it was ever heard.

Response
Once the virus began spreading, the dominant message from prophetic people was that the virus would disappear quickly and things would return to normal. A common message was that the virus would be “past by Passover”, which is odd, because it implies that God is governed by a religious timetable. Jesus victory over sin and evil was achieved on the cross 2000 years ago, so there was nothing extra that he could do at Easter this year. Two thousand people died of the virus in the US on one day during Easter, so it was clearly wrong to say that the impact of the disease would be over by Passover.

Sadly, I have noted a bit of racial bias creeping into some of the messages. In particular, some prophetic people have joined into the increasingly common hatred of China.

The prophetic can easily get mixed with the patriotic. I have also noted a touch of national hubris amongst some of the “American Prophets”. One declared that God would quickly restore America to a place of economic dominance in the world, so that other contenders for that role would be put back in their place. Some are picking a quick recovery of the US share market, which would be a pyrrhic victory, because if it happens, the markets will have been artificially pumped up by the loose money policies of the Federal Reserve.

Many prophetic voices have focussed on 2 Chron 7:14.

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

However, there has been more emphasis on praying and seeking his face, than on turning from wicked ways. There have been very few suggestions of what wicked ways that nations need to turn from, which suggests that this verse does not fit our context.

Quantity over Quality
During the last few decades, we have seen a massive increase in the quantity of prophecy, especially personal prophecy, which has been marvellous.

We are now at a stage, where we need to see an equally massive lift in quality, especially for prophecy about nations. That is a much bigger challenge, because it needs prophetic character.

Perspective

Humans have a tendency to focus on what is close hand and miss the bigger picture. The news media in NZ are really upset about the deaths of the 10 elderly people who have died from Covid19. While it is sad for the families of these people, the rest of us should keep the problem in perspective. We seem to have been beset by a terrible fear of death.

Back in 1948 when the world was spooked by the threat of atomic war, CS Lewis wrote the following words.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors – anaesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

The good times that we have lived through in the last few decades have lulled us into a false sense of security about the reality of living in a fallen world. My father, who grew up during the great depression, used to say.

During hard times people thought they would last forever. Now during good times, people think they will last forever too, but both views are wrong.

Now after many good years, we are disturbed by an event that we cannot easily control, but which should not surprise us.

We should also be careful that we are not spooked by numbers. Death is not something that should not happen. It is inevitable, for all of us. According to the Vitals Statistics published by the Department of Statistics, about 25,000 who are over 70 years of age die each year. That is about 500 a week. I presume that about half of these would have died in aged care facilities. That means that 200-300 people die in rest homes each week. We see their names in the death notices in the paper, but unless we recognise their names, we pass over quickly. Of course, it is usually very sad for their families, but death is part of life.

Children are always being born, and people are always dying. That is the cycle of life. Even if the total number of deaths in New Zealand due to Covid19 were to increase to 100, that would only be a fifth of the number of 70+ people who will die each week. Some of these extra deaths might be shocking and sad, but people die on traumatic and shocking ways all the time. That is the nature of life on earth.

If a nurse with three young children dies of Covid19 that is incredibly sad, but sad stuff happens all the time in this fallen world. Young women with children die all the time of cancer and care accidents. All deaths that cut lives short before they are complete are especially sad.

When people reach the age of eighty, their likelihood of dying increases significantly. Both my parent died in their late eighties. We were really sad to lose them, and we miss them, but there was a sense in which their lives were complete. They had done what they were put on earth to do. Their best years were behind them. Nothing can replace them, but the gap is filled by the next generation of grandchildren blossoming forth. That is how life works.

The reality is that people in rest homes die all the time, and often quite soon after they move in. In normal times a third of all deaths in New Zealand occur in rest homes.

My parents both died in a rest home. I remember the day when they moved into it. It was a relief because they could not cope in the place where they had been living. However, there was also a pang of sadness, because they and we knew that their lives were winding down, and they would not be able to keep on supporting the huge number of people that they related to in service of the Lord. It seemed like part of their lives was already dying. In some ways, death is a process, just like growing up. (For some, a virus will significantly speed up that process.)

While they lived in the rest home, my parents were at peace, because they did not fear death. They knew that because they had trusted in Jesus, death is not the end, but a gateway to fullness of life with Jesus. Death is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is not being prepared for death when it comes.

God’s people must be careful that they do not caught get up in the fear of death. For us, death is not the end, but a door to a new and better life. Death is not my greatest fear. My greatest fear is finishing my life without having completed everything that called me to do.

Treasury Estimates

The NZ Treasury released its estimates today for the effects on the economy of the Covid19 virus and associated shutdown.

The scenarios considered vary depending on how long the country is kept in each level of the shutdown. I thought scenario 1 looked most realistic; it assumes that Level 4 will last a month, then Level 3 for a month followed by Level 1 or 2 for ten months. The worst case is scenario 4, which assumes Level 4 for three months and Level 3 for 3 months. That does not seem plausible, but I presume it was put in there to make the others seem more acceptable.

Two figures stood out to me. First, if the best scenario applies, quarterly real GDP drops from 64 billion dollars in the March 2020 quarter to 54 billion dollars in the September quarter, when the economy has had quite a few months to recover. That is a drop of 14 percent, which is a huge hit on the economy. It takes out quite a few years’ worth of economic growth at a time when the population has grown rapidly, so the effect on real GDP per capita will be even worse.

The Treasury notes that this number is just an estimate, but I would have preferred that they gave more information about the assumptions on it was based, and an indication of the plausible range for their estimates. It makes a big difference, whether the estimated decline between March and September is between 12 and 16 percent, or whether it is between 9 and 20 percent.

But you cannot eat GDP, so these figures probably do not mean much to many people. However, the other figure that I noted really brings it home.

Under their best-case scenario, the Treasury estimates that unemployment will be 13 percent of the workforce in the September quarter 2020, well after the finish of the lockdown. The New Zealand workforce consists of about 1.5 million people, so 13 percent unemployment means 195,000 people without work. That is a huge amount of pain. Many of those who lose their jobs will be able to collect unemployment benefits, but many others will be the partner of someone who is working, so they will not qualify for a benefit.

My initial response to the estimates is that the Treasury is overconfident about how quickly the economy will recover. I will be interested to see what other economists say about this. It depends on how much account the Treasury has taken of the effects of business closures rippling through the economy.

Treasury seems to be assuming that the world economy will only decline by about 3 percent in the best case, and 6 percent in the worst case. That also seems to be a little optimistic.

• The Chinese economy was already slowing sharply before the virus struck, and it is uncertain how quickly it will recover.

• The US financial sector is very shaky. The collapse in the value of shares and bonds means that many debtors have had to stump more for collateral for their loans. It is not clear that all will be able to do it. Many large corporates have burnt up their cash reserves and are finding it difficult to find credit. There are huge risks around derivatives linked to the price of oil. The Federal Reserve is trying to shore the financial system up with more credit, but it is still not clear that they will be successful.

• As they recover, the nations of the world are like to pull back from dependence on international trade and try to be more self-sufficient. That will increase the cost of producing everything that people need and make life more difficult for exporting nations.

I suspect that as we go out of the shutdown, the New Zealand economy will face stronger headwinds than the Treasury is assuming. The world is not just dealing with a health crisis; it is also facing a financial crisis.

Three Problems

The lockdown in New Zealand seems to have successfully slowed the spread of Covid19. However, three problems have become evident.

First, the virus was brought and spread here by returning international travellers. The government was too slow to restrict travellers from countries with spreading infection, to put in place adequate screening at airports, and introduce strict quarantine for people with risk of infection.

Second, many of the big clusters of infection spread at big social functions, like parties and weddings. The government introduced a ban on meetings of more than a 100 people on 19 March, a week before the lockdown began on 26 March. A ban on meetings of more than 500 people had been in place since 16 March. In hindsight this tolerance of large social functions was a mistake, as in the ten days before the lockdown, big social functions allowed the virus to spread and create large clusters of infection. A much tighter limit on the number of people at a social gathering during this period would have significantly reduced the spread of infection.

Third, the virus has spread quickly in some large rest homes and associated dementia units. The way that we care for our elderly and vulnerable people with disabilities has been exposed as vulnerable to an epidemic.

In New Zealand, as in many places in the western world, the elderly are mostly secluded away in massive rest home facilities, which can house several hundreds of people on one site, offering variable levels of care. These rest homes are operated by large corporates, which make their money by selling units to retired people and then buying them back at a lower price, when the owner dies, or moves because they need a higher level of care. Any capital gains go to the corporate owner.

In the rest home part of the facility, elderly people sit close together in a large, shared lounge. The rest home facilities need a large staff of carers, administrators, nurses, cleaners, cooks, etc. Most of these positions are very poorly paid, so they have to be staffed by recent migrants, who are willing to do unpleasant work for poor pay. The government pays for people who have used up all their assets, so it is happy for the costs to be pushed down.

The government banned all people from visiting rest homes, to reduce the risk of infection. But large numbers of workers go in and out every day. The risk of them bring in infection is higher, because migrants travel overseas more frequently to visit their families, sometimes to places where the virus was spreading. The other problem is that poorly paid employees are often reluctant to stay home from work if they are sickening, because they cannot afford to lose their income.

The way we care for the elderly is a recipe for problems during an epidemic. I hope that when this is over, the government and the nation will find a better way to care for our elderly than our current financialise, corporatised system. They deserve better.

Uncertain Vaccine

Everyone seems to be assuming that a vaccine will be found for the Covid19, and that once it has been released to the world, everything that has been disrupted will return to normal. Americans assume that, even if the Chinese fail to do it, American drug companies will succeed in producing a vaccine, because Trump has made America great again. I suspect that this is humanist over-confidence. Modern nations assume every problem can be solved by human ingenuity. We have modern technology so everything will be fine.

However, there is no guarantee that an effective an economic vaccine will be discovered. If the virus was created by the spiritual powers of evil, they may be just clever enough to create one that is immune to a vaccine.

A vaccine that works in the laboratory is not always easy to get into the field. The flu vaccine is happy being carried in egg yoke, but other potential vaccines might not be so easy to deliver. Potential vaccines have to be tested carefully, as if they are not exactly right, they can make recipients more vulnerable to the disease. Therefore, we should not assume that a vaccine can be developed, as there are many viruses for which no vaccine has possible. For example, there is no effective vaccine for the common cold despite extensive research. A vaccine for Shingles took ten years to develop.

Political leaders should be thinking about how they will respond if an effective vaccine for Covid19 cannot be developed. The virus could be swirling around the world for several years. There is no certainty yet that the antibodies developed by people who have recovered from the virus will be effective for many years after the event. In the worst case, people who have been infected with Covid19 might be infected again and again, just like humans are affected with the common cold over and over again.

If the worst happens and Covid19 whirls around the world each winter, international air travel is like to be severely constrained. People who arrive on an aeroplane from another nation will probably have to be quarantined for two weeks when they arrive. That will put most people off travelling at all. International tourism will be totally impractical. Local quarantine areas might need to be established to constrain outbreaks of the virus. Our ability to move from city to city and town to town will be severely listed. Many things that we currently do will become impractical.

Here in New Zealand, by locking down the borders and imposing self-isolation on everyone, the government seems to have dramatically flattened the curve. Only fifteen infected people are in hospital and the number of new cases has levelled, and may be falling. The problem with this is that this leaves the country with almost no herd immunity, but carrying the cost of a massive shutdown.

Some experts are suggesting that the virus could come in waves, as happened with the 1918 flu. New Zealand skipped the first wave due to restrictions on travel during wartime, but was hit hard in the second wave in November 1918. If a second wave of the covid19 arrives, NZ might have to go through a second costly lockdown, which I am not sure the country could bear. The alternative would be to keep the border restricted putting all international visitors through a two-week quarantine for quite some time.