Cabinet documents relating to the Valentine's Day cluster reveal failures to implement ministers' orders and debates over appropriate public health measures
In the aftermath of the first Auckland lockdown earlier this year, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield argued against requiring New Zealanders to wear masks on public transport outside of Auckland at Level 1, but the Government implemented the measure anyway.
The revelation is one of several found in a set of Cabinet documents relating to the Valentine's Day cluster that were quietly released on the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet website this week.
The papers also show the Government intended to legally require members of the Papatoetoe School Community to stay home until they had received a negative test result when Auckland first stepped back down the alert levels. But this legal order was only made a week later, when it became clear that people had not followed or not received the health guidance "encouraging" them to remain at home.
National Party Covid-19 response spokesperson Chris Bishop said a legal order "would have made life easier for everyone, including the officials who were carrying out the contacts and the instructions to the people in the community. Presumably that's why Cabinet authorised and it's a real mystery as to why it wasn't implemented. Most people would want to know what the answer to that is."
Cabinet did indeed say that a Section 70 order under the Health Act would put legal backing behind additional restrictions on the school community.
"A Medical Officer of Health would require Papatoetoe School students, teachers, volunteers and households to remain at home (under S70 Health Act 1956)," the February 17 Cabinet paper notes.
"Staff, volunteers, students and anyone with symptoms will be asked to get tested over the weekend. Welfare and financial support will be provided. The powers available under S70 Health Act are sufficient to give effect to these additional measures."
When asked by Newsroom later that day whether a legal order would be used to enforce the additional measures, however, Bloomfield said it wasn't needed.
"So we contemplated that, and it’s certainly a tool we could use. However, what I would say is - as I said in my comments - the school has been incredibly supportive and cooperative around the measures to date, and with the expectation that students require a negative test before going back on Monday, and with the support that can go into supporting that school community - we didn’t feel that an order was necessary to achieve what we wanted to achieve," he said.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Health didn't answer Newsroom's questions around the lack of implementation, pointing only to the decision to issue an order a week later. By that time, additional people had tested positive for Covid-19 and the Government had admitted that some of these cases had been to work. A legal order would have made this a breach of the health rules, but instead these new cases had only been "encouraged" to stay home.
Even this February 23 order was secret until Newsroom obtained it on March 3.
"Yet again we have a scenario where Cabinet authorises something but it's just not implemented," Bishop said.
"Ultimately it's up to Cabinet to make sure its directives are implemented, but you've also got to say, well, why are officials deciding not to do something that Cabinet has authorised them to do?"
Elsewhere in the papers, the Government concedes its communications to contacts of Covid-19 cases left something to be desired.
"There have been some significant challenges in the response to this latest outbreak related to our usual approach to communications," Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins wrote in a March 5 Cabinet paper, as Auckland prepared to step down from its second lockdown in a matter of weeks.
"Understanding the changes to contact tracing has been confusing for people. In particular the new categories of casual-plus and close-plus contacts, and different instructions for household members depending on whether they were customers or staff at a location of interest is contributing to this. Agencies are working together to strengthen the communications approach regarding school outbreak," he added later in the same paper.
In a statement to Newsroom, Hipkins said these comments referred only to communications to the wider community and that his public defences of communications to the school community still stood.
Bishop called the communications and response in February "a real mess. When you reflect back on it, the communication was very unclear".
Elsewhere in the papers, Bloomfield argued that mandatory masking on public transport outside of Auckland, which was introduced at Level 1 as a temporary measure after the country stepped down levels for the first time in February, was no longer needed.
"The Director-General has reviewed the temporary measure under Alert Level 1 to require face coverings on all public transport and his advice is that this requirement should now be revoked," Hipkins wrote.
"The Director-General considers that the mandatory requirement for using face coverings on public transport is a justified and proportionate measure where there is evidence of Covid-19 community transmission. As there is no current community transmission, and the current outbreak is well contained his advice is that on balance, the additional precautionary measure of face coverings on public transport is not required."
Later in the same paper, Hipkins writes he leans towards maintaining the requirement "as a precautionary measure to limit the risk of Covid-19 spreading undetected in the community".
In comments to Newsroom explaining why Cabinet overrode the Director-General, Hipkins pointed to another part of Bloomfield's advice, where he said masking could be "a constant ‘reminder’ to people of the ongoing threat posed by the Covid-19 pandemic" and would incentivise following other public health measures.
The Ministry of Health spokesperson didn't answer Newsroom's questions about whether Bloomfield and the ministry still believe mandatory masking at Level 1 isn't needed.
