How effective is New Zealand’s lockdown against the Delta strain, compared with Australia’s? People wish for better ways of locking down, but there is not ‘better’ lockdown than an absolute one if you are trying to control spread of a virus.
Here comes delta – only a single case but it has triggered a national lockdown.
Where has the New Zealand COVID experiment got to in the last 5 weeks? In comparison to China, or Sweden, we’re looking pretty good. Which is why we are moving from Alert Level 4 to Level 3 for the next 2 weeks.
We often rely on trusting others to do the right thing, both when your partner hands you a water bottle and when your COVID experiment requires you to social distance. However, we have the strange discrepancy returning New Zealanders are trusted to self-quarantine while we are not trusted to swim in the sea and not drown. Hmmm…
COVID is making my brain fuzzy, like when we were living through the Canterbury earthquakes. An opinion piece in Stuff today made my brain even fuzzier, when it suggested we need a milder lockdown to keep the economy going. The economy serves the people, we don’t exist to serve the economy. If a lockdown saves many people’s lives, isn’t that what we need to do?
“You can’t be happy all the time, but you can be content,” my Dad would say. He was remarkably contented. Here are two other exemplars of contentment I’d like to introduce you to.
The world is setting up COVID-19 management experiments and New Zealand is one of them. We will be able to compare, in an action research setting, how different approaches to COVID work. New Zealand and Norway are lockding down, like much of Europe, while Sweden is staying open and asking people to physically isolate. I will watch the case data with interest.
