Marc Daalder
Marc Daalder is a senior political reporter in Wellington who covers Covid-19, climate change, energy, primary industries, technology and the far right. Twitter: @marcdaalder.
COVID-19
The traffic light system is not fit for purpose, but New Zealand still needs a clear framework to respond to Covid-19 spikes, writes Marc Daalder
Remark: We’ve hit another crisis point with Covid-19, but this time with no toolbox to get us out of it.
That was the implicit message behind the government’s announcement on Thursday that masks and RAT kits will be free to all New Zealanders, but that the country will not move to the red setting in the traffic light system.
Modeling shows that hospitalizations from Covid-19 could exceed the peak of the first Omicron wave in the next two to three weeks, Health Director General Ashley Bloomfield said. Given that hospital admissions are a week behind reported cases, and those cases are also about a week behind actual infections, urgent action is needed now to flatten the curve and keep hospitalizations below 1,000.
Despite this, no new public health measures or restrictions were announced on Thursday. The red setting, said Covid-19 minister Ayesha Verrall, “would probably only provide an incremental benefit”.
The government has painted itself in a corner on Covid-19.
In March and April, the traffic light system designed to stop Delta was needed and even more gutted. Green, orange and red were meant to correspond to a double set of collection limits for hospitality, hairdressers, gyms, movie theaters and more – a looser limit for locations that used vaccine cards and a stricter one for those who chose not to.
Of course, those vaccine passes are now gone. While the government said it could reintroduce them if necessary, that seems increasingly unlikely over the weeks. Contact tracing, QR code scanning and other measures were also removed from the system after the first Omicron peak. The toolbox was turned upside down and shaken furiously – we were left with the sediment.
That is: collecting limits and masks in most places at Red; masks in most places other than schools in Orange; no mask requirements at Green. A set of isolation rules at all levels that: experts say they are not in line with science†
No wonder Red probably won’t make a difference, when it’s so thoroughly stripped of all meaning.
In March, the government insisted that the tools it had just pulled from the toolbox would still be available if needed. Now it’s discovered the obvious: It’s a lot harder to reintroduce restrictions when the public saw a few months ago that you were removing them without a clear system for restoring them.
By completely removing these public health measures from the traffic light system, the government has only exacerbated the problem. The purpose of a framework such as the alarm levels or traffic lights is to signal what is possible in response to changes in the Covid-19 situation.
Even when we were at level 1, we knew that a level 3 or 4 block could happen if the circumstances warranted it. Of course, compliance ebbed away with each reintroduction of restrictions, but most New Zealanders were comfortable with the restrictions because it was within the limits of their expectations.
That was the real beauty of the alert level system. It required scientific conclusions about the likely need for fluctuating restrictions as Covid-19 rose and disappeared and mapped them into a framework that anyone could understand.
The original traffic light system did this too, with more focus on vaccination passes.
Government communications have struggled when they stray from this path, tinkering with institutions within a single level of the existing framework. We saw that in October last year, when the three-step plan to take Auckland out of Level 3 was widely ridiculed. The three-phase Omicron plan also encountered confusion earlier this year.
We may be about to see a repeat of those failures. Bloomfield told Newsroom on Thursday that the Department of Health was investigating what changes would need to be made to Red to make it work for Omicron.
That smacks of even more to make up for right away.
New Zealand is in dire need of a framework designed to handle the widespread transmission of hypertransmissible variants such as Omicron across the community. Just as the alert level system was built in response to the most current evidence, a new system must be aligned with the latest science. That framework could be flexible to tinker with future variants, but the bones need to be clear and resilient to changes in the Covid-19 situation.
Without that framework, only the desperate pleas of health officials are left to heed the advice already in place and not being followed.
The government has been “encouraging” and “recommending” caution around Covid-19 for months, even as it continues to weaken and withdraw the de facto rules.
Is it any surprise that people are taking charge of the government’s actions and not its words?
There’s no reason to think the latest barrage of encouragements and recommendations will change anything. And that’s a horrifying conclusion when even Bloomfield says immediate, urgent action is needed to prevent the health system from becoming overloaded.
“It’s today. These are today’s actions. Everyone can make a difference in terms of their actions today,” Bloomfield said.
“That’s the argument: The sooner they do that, the lower the peak and the lower the impact on our health system.”