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Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will we comply with the extended lockdown?

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Sat, 15 Aug 2020, 9:42AM

Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will we comply with the extended lockdown?

Author
Newstalk ZB,
Publish Date
Sat, 15 Aug 2020, 9:42AM

I'll tell you what, I’m not convinced how compliant Aucklanders will be this time around.

Already, we've witnessed Aucklanders fleeing the city to the Coromandel and Queenstown despite direct instructions to stay put in order to keep covid out of other regions. Anecdotally, people are less inclined to follow all the rules this time around.

It wouldn't be surprising if this happened given the way it played out in Victoria for their second lockdown.  First time, it worked okay.  Covid came back via the border and during the second lockdown, a huge amount of rule breaking. Even if they were covid positive, people were going to work.

The concept of lockdown fatigue here is being discussed by academics already.

Mostly, they’re confident we will be more cooperative than other parts of the world. Their argument is that we've had a taste of a covid free life… so we know if we work together we can get there again and that will incentive's rule-following.

But then, didn't Victoria also?  Didn’t they go back to a relatively normal life and still not follow the rules second time around?

Our problem might be, and this is something Christopher Gale, a senior lecturer in psychiatry at the University of Otago, has pointed to, the mental effort to rise to the challenge of another lockdown.

We know how hard this will be and how long it could end up being. 

Probably we need to accept… the efficiency of these lockdowns diminishes every time we turn to them.  Really, a lockdown is something to be done once and then not again.

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