When former prime minister Dame Jacinda Ardern and her government announced New Zealand would be going into lockdown from 11.59pm on March 25, 2020, it’s unlikely they would have imagined that, almost six years later, the country would be into its ninth wave of the Covid-19 virus.
The devastation delivered on the world towards the end of 2019, which spread rapidly in the first couple of months of 2020, is still around, despite the best efforts of many to play it down or ignore it, particularly over the past couple of years.
We say still around in two senses — the first, that we are continuing to have, and report, Covid deaths as a result of infection from more recent variants of the virus; the second, that the effects of the peak of the pandemic, from 2020 to 2022, are still with us, physically, psychologically, socially and economically.
In many ways it is difficult to believe what actually happened six years ago and the pall it cast around the globe. Sometimes the lockdowns and the fear feel like a long time ago, but other times it seems just like yesterday. We all have our own Covid stories.
Yesterday afternoon, the phase two Royal Commission on Covid-19 report was released. This covers the period from February 2021 to October 2022, and Labour government decisions then on vaccine mandates, national and regional lockdowns, and testing and tracing methodologies.
There are 24 formal recommendations which aim to improve future population-level decision-making in the "worst of circumstances". Among them are viewing the elimination strategy as temporary, improving public health and economic modelling, limiting urgency in lawmaking, reviewing research on social cohesion and creating a financial-assistance scheme before the next crisis.
Is this telling us anything we didn’t know? Most of us are cognisant of the fact that as good as job as the government did initially with lockdowns which saved thousands of lives, those lockdowns went on for far too long in Auckland and the Far North, fuelling a great deal of anger and resentment there, as did vaccination mandates.
The report says the Labour government mostly took a balanced approach but that communications with the public about the longer-term plan were poor. It also said the strategy effectively got stuck in a rut and a broader range of scenarios to address matters should have been considered.
Predictably, Health Minister Simeon Brown had a go at Labour and its leader Chris Hipkins over the findings. Mr Hipkins was interim health minister and Covid-19 response minister during the period of the report.
Dame Jacinda and former finance minister and deputy prime minister Grant Robertson issued a statement saying they "got a lot right ... but there are areas that could have been better".
It is now up to the current government to consider all the recommendations from both royal commission reports, with a response expected by July.
The release of the report comes at a time when Covid is on the rise again, according to the latest figures from Health New Zealand and University of Otago professor of public health Michael Baker.
It hasn’t gone away. The virus is still working away, occasionally flaring up and making a lot of people ill, some very seriously so.
The statistics show in the past week there have been more than 50 people hospitalised with Covid and 19 people with the virus have died.
Prof Baker says this is the ninth wave of Covid in New Zealand and that there have been about two waves of the virus a year since the Omicron variant began spreading widely early in 2022.
The surge appears linked to a drop in immunity rather than a new subvariant, with dwindling antibodies allowing it more of a foothold.
It’s been a while since we last heard the once well-worn mantra of boosters, testing and isolation, but that is what Prof Baker is recommending to keep the virus’ spread down and hospitals as free of Covid as possible.
As Covid remains New Zealand’s most deadly infectious disease, getting a booster now is a no-brainer.
