People deliberately flouting lockdown rules are putting New Zealand and New Zealanders at risk. Photo / Getty Images
People deliberately flouting lockdown rules are putting New Zealand and New Zealanders at risk. Photo / Getty Images
What part of ''stay in your bubble'' is so hard to understand for some people?
What part of ''stay in your bubble'' is so hard to do?
Our task is simple. We all need to stay home unless we are essential workers, or we're travelling to get essential items suchas food or healthcare, or doing safe exercise in our neighbourhood.
But thousands of people either think these rules don't apply to them or have not bothered to understand them.
There have been 37,000 reports of lockdown breaches in New Zealand. Health Minister David Clark breached the rules when he drove his family 20km to a beach to go for a walk during the first weekend of the lockdown. He also went mountain biking during lockdown and although it was a local track, people are asked to avoid activities where there is a higher risk of injury.
More than 40 selfish individuals face prosecution for flouting lockdown rules.
In the modern world we live in there is no reason for such defiance or mistakes.
Unlike many of our grandparents, great-grandparents and great-greats we are not being asked to go to war to protect our loved ones and country.
Our sacrifice is to simply stay in our bubbles, sheltered and warm and with the luxuries of electricity and modern technology that come with that.
We can access groceries with the click of a button or with help from friends or neighbours and healthcare can be as simple as an initial phone call.
At the moment, our health workers are not stretched today like they were in 1918 when the lethal influenza pandemic struck our nation and killed at least 9000 people in about six weeks - half the number of Kiwis killed in World War I over four years.
But if narrow-minded people continue to ignore the rules of the Covid-19 lockdown our health system could be stretched beyond capacity and the result could be catastrophic.
Covid-19 is a real threat to the world and it should be taken seriously. Around the world there are more than 1.5 million Covid-19 cases - more than 300,000 have recovered, and more than 87,000 deaths.
As of Friday afternoon the combined total of confirmed and probable cases in New Zealand was 1283, with 373 recovered cases and two deaths.
In New Zealand, a country with a population of less than 5 million, this virus has the potential to devastate our small island nation if we don't follow the rules of the alert level 4 lockdown.
