So if the rumours are true, I personally don’t think they are, today we go into a red light.

I first heard this rumour last Friday. A worried retailer told my husband he’d heard from ‘someone very reliable’ (isn’t it always?) that Monday was going to see an announcement of a red light. I was immediately suspicious. It reminded me of all those times over the past couple of years when rumours ran rife that we’d be going into a lockdown, because they’d heard it from ‘a reputable source’. 

The source was always someone’s friend or partner who worked ‘deep inside the Beehive’, ‘so they knew’.

This also reminds me of all the rumours we got fed on high rotate about Clarke Gayford for a while there. That rumour cycle went for months, and it was always from ‘a reliable source’ or someone who knew someone who worked in the Police, or the Prison, or the Court. In fact, those rumours got so out of control the unusual step was taken by Police to shut them down by denying them. This was unusual because 101 of rumours is ignoring them and never addressing them because you only give them oxygen. But when they gain momentum, big momentum, it becomes impossible to ignore I guess.

So by Saturday I had contacts in the South Island messaging me saying they’d heard ‘from a really reliable source’ that we were going into a red light Monday.

By Sunday, more texts and messages rolled in. ‘Red light Monday’, they told me. This even got conflated by some people who had confused a red light with a lockdown. ‘Better get to the hairdresser before Monday,’ one text to me said.

Here’s the thing, the more I got messaged about it, the more I felt it was untrue. How was it possible that on Friday last week, a decision had been made to go into a red light. Three days later, and that decision had been leaked so far and wide that basically everyone was talking about it. Three days before it even got announced. Three days before they would have had current case numbers to work with.

Not possible. 

Now I don’t doubt that if cases keep spiralling up and hospitals get more and more swamped with flu, and nurses and doctors off sick, then a red light may well come into play.

But I don’t think the first week of the school holidays is the time we’ll see it. Think about it logically. They’re looking for these holidays to be a circuit breaker, kids out of school, people taking a break. It would surely be premature to throw us into a red light when what you want is for everything to be open and pumping to help our struggling little economy.

Imagine the businesses, the events, the sports fixtures, and the clubs. All having to grind to a halt in terms of crowd sizes right on school holidays. I doubt it. Add to that a PM flittering around the international stage telling everyone we're open for business. There’s no way she's going to plunge us into a red light at that point, far less while she's not even in the country.

But those who’ve heard the rumour are adamant. It’s happening, they tell me. So today we’ll know for sure. We either go into a red light and I’m completely wrong. Or I'm right, and the 'reliable sources' are proven not all that reliable.