Happy Anniversary! (Patreon)

It's Wellington Anniversary day today. This means I'm not at work. Instead I have woken up to Omicron vs NZ round 1.

It's been nearly two years now. Covid has owned our lives. Whether we openly acknowledge it or try to live our lives like it's not there, it remains. Tucked away in the corner of our mind like a little nugget of anxiety.

Had Omicron not emerged, NZ would justifiably feel pretty good about its Covid response. We had a pretty good summer, our Delta community cases, hospitalisations, and deaths stayed low. We did good. But the Global South was denied access to vaccines and so variants were able to emerge while smug developed countries attempted to vaccinate with gay abandon.

So now we're faced with what seems an unstoppable variant. We haven't had a big wave of covid. As far as I know we're one of the few countries that hasn't. This means that we don't know exactly what's coming. And that unknown, that's the scariest thing.

I have a 3 year old I can't vaccinate. I have older parents and in-laws with some comorbidities that put them at high risk if they catch Covid. I'm not thrilled that this cloud of risk is just hanging over us.

I've been a critic of this Government for not being left enough, and that holds, but I'm bloody pleased they're overseeing the covid response compared to National/ACT. Those two wanted MIQ abolished late last year. But Labour took a cautious approach and in doing so bought us more time to a) enjoy some kind of summer and b) get boosters and child vaccines begun.

Luxon already seems to be following the same weirdly critical path as his predecessors. He told the Herald that Labour wasn't doing enough.

Every day at 4pm, I would be calling the chairs of the DHBs saying, ‘How many extra staffed ICU beds do you have today? Have we got treatment drugs approved, what’s holding them up?

This is a CEO's view of Government. If we unpick it, it's depressingly naive. Chairs don't manage operational things like ICU beds. Also, we know the number of ICU beds used. Those numbers don't change dramatically. DHBs also don't approve treatments. That's Pharmac and Medsafe. And there have been several announcements in the past few months about new treatments.

I know all this, and I'm a humble PR Rat. Luxon should know all this as he wants to be Prime Minister. He's just saying words that make it sound like he'd do stuff. I think we've all worked for people like that. Usually middle managers who rely on others to do their work then spout off with jargony nonsense.

So if you're feeling scared that's ok. Perfectly valid response to an unknown. If you're not scared then that's great! But try and be mindful that this is a stressful time for a lot of people. We'll all work together I expect. We'll do our best.

One piece of comfort that I took into our delta outbreak was that no country was as well prepared for a new outbreak as us. Vaccines, treatments, they've all been developed and rolled out. And because of our good fortune and management at delaying delta/omicron's arrival, we've been able to learn a lot. So happy anniversary, and good luck.