Are we over-reacting to coronavirus? I think it’s too early to say - we don’t yet know enough about this virus.

But I’ll tell you what we can say, and that is that we’re reacting badly.

We seem to have a two-pronged approach to shutting down our border. The government’s now banned foreigners coming from China for the next two weeks.

But it’s made the call that New Zealand citizens coming from China are still able to get in, as long as they self-quarantine for two weeks.

Does that make any sense to you? How can we rely on self-quarantining? Do we honestly think that someone who says ‘yes I’ll stay home for two weeks’ will necessarily stay home for two weeks?

Let’s just think about the logistics of someone coming home. So they get off the plane at the airport and then go through customs. They could infect any of the people they come into contact with.

Then how do they get home from the airport? Get picked up by a family member, get into a taxi, get onto the bus? Again, could infect someone else.

Get home, fridge is empty. Have to go to the supermarket. Or they send a family member to the supermarket, but they’re in contact with the family member.

You see where I’m going with this. Asking someone to self-quarantine is fraught with opportunities for them to unwittingly infect someone else if they are infected.

Now if we’re so relaxed about that scenario, why are we taking the drastic step of banning foreign nationals transiting through or coming from China?

That is a huge cost to us economically. The tourism industry says we should expect 40,000 Chinese visitors in the next month, spending up to $5000 each.

So if do go with the two week ban, a crude calculation would say we’re losing half the visitors - that’s $100 million we’re forfeiting.

That’s not even counting the flights that are now being cancelled because of the empty seats, and the cargo we can’t export that would’ve been on those planes. The costs are going to mount.

Now I’d be comfortable with that if the government was certain that it was a price worth paying to keep the virus out.

But given that we’re relying on people to self-quarantine, I don’t think they can be certain.