Part of the fallout from Friday's attempt by the Health Minister to convince us centralisation is working and people on waiting lists are getting seen to was the excuse, yet again, that Covid had caused at least part of the back log.

Many of us have grown tired of Covid as the excuse for everything.

Although I have no doubt it did play a part, and perhaps in some cases it may still be, what we are not doing and I doubt the royal commission is going to give it the weight it deserves, is asking - did it have to be this way?

If you can blame Covid for health backlogs it will be for the very simple reason that we locked the place down and had, at the peak, a couple of thousand beds lying empty, just in case.

The Government and their apparatchiks have continued to trumpet the nonsense about lives saved. Whatever number of lives were saved have to be counter-balanced now against the ones that haven't been post the pandemic.

The people who didn’t get seen, still aren't getting seen, and have either died or continued to suffer needless complications and diminished quality of life because of the desperation to save those who may, or may not, have got Covid when we were in a full panic.  

To even have a waiting list that lasts three years is clearly absurd, but there you have it.

That’s before you get to what appears to be a blatant gerrymandering of numbers by the minister, by instructing hospitals to do cases at the back of the list, at what clinicians tell us is at the expense of those further up.

Gaslighting an exhausted and overworked group of professionals like doctors and nurses might well prove to be the minister's undoing. We have a tendency to believe doctors and nurses when they say things aren't the way the politicians say it is.

This of course is not the first time health and waiting lists have become political, far less election fodder.

But Frank Frizelle, who we interviewed on Friday, happens to be the editor of the NZ Medical Journal. I saw his name as I read the latest edition over the weekend.

He called the Verrall claims a fraud, a scam. Blokes like him don’t say that stuff because they are stirrers, they say it because it's true.

The price we pay, and continue to pay, for Covid grows by the day. Blame it all you want but if you do, weigh it up against what we now face because of the way we reacted four years ago.

The worse today looks shows we got it increasingly wrong back then.