Almost heartbreakingly and yet entirely predictably, a bunch of media outlets have gone back to that tired, old, and lazy approach to Covid reporting. That's asking Michael Baker what he thinks.

Desperate to drum up yet more alarm and fear, he wants a return to the alert level systems because we have new variants and death is coming.

What wasn’t covered to the extent it should have been, was the government's announcement of the extension to their health and wellness support package, First Steps.

It was a $10 million programme rolled out to deal with the stress, anxiety, fear, depression, and general mental health damage that was inflicted upon us by the government through their approach to Covid.

Why do you think it's being extended? Demand is the answer.

What we should be focusing on is the damage. Not more fear, speculation, and modelling.

The Reserve Bank's unfolding $9 billion dollar fits into the same category. You and I are paying for Adrian Orr's printing spree and Grant Robertson's almost inexplicable desire to indemnify him for the damage he has done.

The trouble with mental health is it’s not as tangible as a $9 billion hole. Or a bit of titillation around variants, cases, death, and everything else we got obsessed with in the dark days.

And because it's intangible, it's also hard to measure in terms of length. How long does the damage go on for and in what form? Did the business go bust? Or is it still operating but the owner is just a shell of what they once were?

Does the malaise that sits over the country in terms of fear, violence, truancy and crime get measured as part of our Covid response?

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This country, as a whole, is a shell of its former self. We are inward-looking, angry, and unsettled. It’s a direct outworking of being a hermit kingdom and being so tragically slow to reopen to the world.

Yes, the whole world has issues. But we have a bad case of those issues and the mental health damage done as a result has not got the attention it deserves. Nor have the Government been held to the level of account they should have been.

Because, instead of holding a few feet to the fire, when Stuart Nash announces an extension to a mental health programme the media, as they so often do these days, simply reprint the press release, as opposed to asking why, and making the Government explain whether they think the ongoing cost and damage is a reasonable price to pay for their world-leading door locking exercise they put us through.