This tricky virus seems to be playing very hard to get, doesn't it? 

I know that Covid 19 exists and that if you get it bad, it's a very nasty virus to get.

But given that we've had a young man sweating it out in an enclosed space with other gym goers and a previously undisclosed dodgy lodger going door to door and STILL nobody has it - surely even the most hysterical Covid alarmist would have to concede that perhaps the threat to civilisation has been somewhat overstated.

Surely the government is going to have to temper the safety first, abundantly cautious approach with a bit of common sense.  You might have heard Aysha Verrall - the deputy health minister - this morning with Mike.

So surely that means region wide lockdowns in the future simply can't be justified.  If the chain of transmission is so confined, keep the lockdown confined. And when we come out of lockdowns, we need to come out of them immediately. 

If the government decides at 4pm we all come down to Level 1, then we should be in Level 1 at 4.01.  It is unconscionable to keep people constrained against their will for a second longer. And between now and the next outbreak, the Ministry of Health needs to lift its game. 

We went into a lockdown because there seemed to be no known contact for the young man who went to the gym - and that's because two of the families didn't disclose to contact tracers that there'd been contact between them. 

Once that contact was established, the young man became part of a tightly contained cluster.  There was no need for the lockdown.  One of the families also failed to disclose they had a lodger at home.  If you were contact tracing, how could you not know this?  Their methods need to improve, they need to have more people available to man the phones in the immediate aftermath of an announcement that there has been an outbreak, and those people manning the phones need to have the correct information. 

As has been typical from the start, messaging from the Ministry has been inconsistent, confusing and just plain wrong at times.  We have had countless examples of that over the week.  They simply have to do better.