Well haven’t we worked ourselves up into a tis was. 

Frustration with 7 weeks of lockdown in Auckland is starting to boil over in public with claims that everything is failing and not working and will never work. We’re being left behind and there is no plan.  And it’s all this Labour government’s fault.

There have been calls to give up the lockdown strategy. To open our borders and start to live again. 

But has New Zealand’s strategy against Covid really been such a failure. 

Melbourne today celebrates it’s 246th day in lockdown becoming the world’s most locked down city.  Meanwhile Sydney approaches their 100^th day in a row.  A rough back of the envelope calculation shows that Auckland is around 120 days all up since March 2020. 

On Saturday Melbourne had 1176 cases and 3 deaths. On Saturday 10 people died in New South Wales.  No body died in Auckland and there were 33 cases. 

While Covid was not eliminated, it was mitigated by the lockdown strategy preventing hospitalisation that we could not cope with. Call me a glass half full fella but I call that a success. 

But, like everyone, I want the lockdowns to stop and in every country where they have there is only one factor that led to their scrapping; and that is the level of vaccination in a population. 

We’re so close to hitting those goals I wonder why on earth would anyone want to throw out the effort that we have made so far. 

There has been a lot of talk about anti vaxxers and the vaccine hesitant but I’m more worried that New Zealand’s remarkable success over the past 18 months is now working against us. 

Last night’s television gave us this admission from a Raglan resident. 

“Before you didn’t really think too much about it but now it’s arrived it’s time for a test and a jab.” 

What an astounding degree of complacency. The Auckland truck driver who drove to Palmerston North: unvaccinated.  The 2 in Raglan: unvaccinated. There appears to be no urgency to get the jab amongst a small minority of New Zealanders.

Not because of ethical grounds, just complacency.

Maybe it’s because we have been fortunate compared to the rest of the world. We’ve worked 464 days since the beginning of the pandemic as opposed to 82 in Australia and 75 in Britain. We don’t have neighbours and family members dying gruesomely. 

But this tardiness has a terrible consequence and that’s a loss of a billion dollars a week from our economy.  You would have thought that was more than enough motivation.