‘Go hard and go early’ has been a winning formula against Covid-19. But as the virus rears its head again, some mistakes are being made too many times, writes political editor Jo Moir.
Journalists are familiar with the expression ‘news knows no time’.
The biggest stories and tips often come in late at night when reporters have already left the office, but the fear of being scooped by a competitor means the laptop gets pulled out and the story gets written in the wee hours of the morning.
It’s not an unrealistic expectation to assume the same sense of urgency for Covid-19 and those working to keep it at bay.
Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins hasn’t been afraid to call out officials when they’ve got the response wrong in the past.
He has done several stocktakes and took the right step of putting in place an advisory group to report back to him in real-time what wasn’t working with the Government’s response.
But as revealed by Newsroom, the real-time advisory group is not real time at all.
The chair of the advisory group, Sir Brian Roche, told Newsroom this week it’s taken longer to set up than hoped and it was regrettable it was sold that way by the minister.
It’s all very well to set up an advisory group, but it’s only as good as the Government’s willingness to listen to it.
One report, into the Valentine’s Day cluster, has been delivered since it was set up in March.
It recommended dropping the overly complicated and confusing case categories - casual plus and close plus - and being more prompt in contacting people when there’s potential Covid cases in the community.
In the last 48 hours the Government’s response in terms of shutting down the trans-Tasman bubble with New South Wales and moving Wellington to Alert Level 2 has been prompt and appropriately cautious.
But it has failed on other counts and Bloomfield, Hipkins and the Prime Minister have been quick to offer excuses.
When Hipkins was asked on Wednesday why it had taken 10 hours between being notified of a Covid case in Wellington and telling the public, he responded: “There was a night-time in between’’.
When Bloomfield was asked why business owners were informing the public about locations of interest faster than the Ministry of Health, he responded: “Our preference is to notify businesses or places of interest before the information becomes public."
When Ardern was asked why the Ministry of Health had used complicated case categories that were meant to have been discarded, she responded: “Ultimately, the most important thing is there’s clear advice for people and what they need to do, and that was there."
None of these answers pass the public expectation test that information is passed on as quickly as possible and in a way that can be easily interpreted.
The idea that the Ministry of Health doesn’t operate overnight when the country is potentially exposed to a new outbreak is baffling.
Claiming a business needs to be told it’s a location of interest before the people who visited it only makes sense if the working theory is that staff are somehow at greater risk than customers.
In the case of the confusing category names, they were eventually deleted by the Ministry of Health after Bloomfield asked his staff to get rid of them.
But they’d already been released publicly with the first tranche of locations of interest on Wednesday morning, putting some people into a spin about what was required.
Ardern was dismissive when asked by Newsroom why the lessons hadn’t been learnt, saying the action people needed to take was also publicly available.
That assumes everyone is monitoring the Ministry of Health website, when the reality is many New Zealanders rely on word-of-mouth or snippets of news, which often would be limited to just a case category.
Accepting fault seems to be harder and harder for government ministers, and confusing communication during the Valentine’s Day cluster is exactly why Hipkins tasked Roche and his colleagues with reviewing what went wrong.
Health Minister Andrew Little was right when he told Newsroom the system would never be perfect.
There will always be blips, but how many times do the same mistakes need to be made?
It’s all very well to set up an advisory group, but it’s only as good as the Government’s willingness to listen to it.
