Verbatim from the Prime Minister at today's press conference:
"Three and a half weeks ago NZ was in a unique position. Unlike other countries we had enough lead-in before Covid 19 reached our shores. That meant we could make a choice.Why would the economy have ground to a halt?
We could allow a wave of devastation to hit us like it has in other countries or we could take decisive preemptive action by going hard and early into lock down to stop the spread of the disease in its tracks. We chose action and the indications at this stage are promising. We will never know what would have happened if we'd taken the first path but the projections were for thousands of deaths if the virus got away on us, many more sick and in hospital and the COUNTRY AND OUR ECONOMY GRINDING TO A HALT REGARDLESS."
Can anybody explain that to me?
We know that Covid 19 is relatively harmless to the working age, those who keep the economy afloat. Hospitals in crisis would be a dreadful but a contained catastrophe. As it stands nobody has been going there anyway.
Lives have a value. Pharmac calculates it somehow. Hospital administrators do it all the time when juggling waiting lists. New Zealand may have sustained much greater loss of life if it hadn't gone into lock down BUT the economy, notwithstanding the damage from external factors beyond our control, would not have ground to a halt.
It would have been hurting, undoubtedly, but the government, with an unholy rush of blood to the head committed the proverbial extremely unkind act of 'kicking a man when he's down.'
5 comments:
The numbers the PM used were also very suspect!!
and contrary to open and transparent government were not made publicly available!!!
They have subsequently been debunked.
http://www.tailrisk.co.nz/documents/Corona.pdf
Thank you for the link. I'd recommend it other readers. Here is an excerpt:
"Focus of deaths needs to be supplemented with an adjustment for life years lost
Not all deaths have the same social cost. The death of a 90 year old can be sad, but
the death of a child or young adult is almost always a tragedy. Burden of disease
estimates often adjust for the number of life years lost and this adjustment should
be made in assessments of the benefits of intervention options."
Though I have to say oneblokesview the modelling was available to the public if you knew where to look at MOH website.
Yeah it's not nice to say but 'time lost' would be a better measure than death. Covid might take a week, month, or year off a life but not much more in most cases. Time extended by a growing economy might also be measured. Life expectancy growth versus time lost to the virus. Not a nice conversation to bring up when Grandma is fearing for her life though.
Much of this could have been avoided if the government had actually closed the borders early and hard instead of desperately trying to reach their March 15 Election launch event.
Hell it would have been nice if the borders were shut hard when the rest of us went into effing lockdown.
Shutting the borders early would have hurt the tourism sector, but we could have kept it on life support with increased local spend especially over Easter.
But no, the PM wanted her vanity event more than the welfare of the country.
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