Category: Health
Instead of locking down the nation and trying to stamp out a virus that cannot effectively be contained, we should be quarantining and supporting those who are vulnerable to keep them safe, while enabling the rest of society to get back to normal. Within a month or so, it should be safe for those vulnerable groups to re-enter society, and to re-open our borders.
Fear of widespread infection in the community of a virulent disease is now sufficient to lock people up in their homes and suspend Parliament. Really! This not the first such plague to affect New Zealand and it will not be the last. Yet this is the first time our civil liberties and our democracy have been suspended in order to minimise its effect on public health.
With all of the indecision, contradictions, and failure to follow the lead of countries that have controlled the virus without destroying their economies, one can’t help but feel our leaders are making this crisis deeper than was necessary.
The only strategy that makes sense is to screen massively, then confine the positive cases. Neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan nor Korea nor Singapore, territories with the lowest mortality rates for Covid-19, have imposed confinement on healthy people.
German immunologist and toxicologist Professor Stefan Hockertz says, “Covid-19 is no more dangerous than influenza, but is simply observed much more closely. More dangerous than the virus is the fear and panic created by the media and the ‘authoritarian reaction’ of many governments.”
Unless the Prime Minister knows something that we don’t, it certainly appears that enacting the Singapore model could have prevented the country from needing to be closed down.
Looking at what Singapore does differently, the biggest one is Singapore doesn’t let positive patients back into the community.
In spite of public officials saying that face masks don’t help to protect people from the virus, they clearly do since that’s what medical staff use.
Investing is an act of optimism. The greater threat for our economy is the damage that has been done to business confidence. Pessimists don't invest.
The only effective way to reduce child poverty is to ensure parents are in work, not on welfare. Policies that make welfare attractive risk deepening the dependency trap.
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