Bruce Bisset: Wait and see attitude will cost lives one day

A health worker watches thermal images monitoring arriving passengers at Suvarnabhumi International airport to help detect passengers who may have been infected with the coronavirus. Photo / File

A week ago, no one inside the Ministry of Health was worried about novel Coronavirus. They saw "no need' to start screening incoming passengers from China, and ignored the advice of outliers urging caution.

Now, suddenly, in Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's words, they're rolling out "everything we can" to stop a potential epidemic.

You would think, after costly biosecurity slip ups like the kiwifruit Psa virus and the recent measles from South-East Asia that New Zealand would have developed a more proactive public border security programme, wouldn't you?

It's not as if our borders are easy to cross. After all, we're surrounded by Pacific Ocean, so you need a boat or a plane to get here.

Compared with most countries, that makes checking incoming goods or people pretty simple.

But no. Wait til it's here, then react.

If that's deliberate (unspoken) government policy, it's doubtless because the actuality these days is that disease or infestation or whatever-you-will in the biological field can zip round the world inside 24 hours, with no one the wiser.

Why pull your hair out over something that may not happen? Just wait and see, and then deal with any consequences as they arise.

That doesn't stop the public anxiously rushing out to buy flimsy and ineffectual face masks in vain hope of warding off the next dangerous bug before it arrives. Seems everyone knows how porous our system is.

I admit I'm conflicted by this conundrum. On the one hand it's no secret our border checks have, over the past 20-plus years, become more slip than shod.

On the other, didymo infesting most of our rivers and tubeworm most our harbours demonstrates any hope of keeping NZ clean as well as green is well gone.

And while you would think human-borne foreign nasties should be more preventable – because you're supposedly dealing with rational beings who will co-operate with health authorities – the failings in our capacity to cope with pandemics are, in the current case, absurdly obvious.

A student arrives from Wuhan, centre of the Chinese epidemic, exhibiting signs of infection. His accommodation provider, very wisely, tells him he can't stay there until he's been tested; after all, the provider has 800 other students in his Auckland building.

The man goes for tests, is told it will take 14 days for results to come through (via Australia – why?) and that as they won't keep him in quarantine in hospital (why not?) he should go back to stay in his accommodation meantime.

The provider, even more wisely, does not appreciate the joke. At time of writing, the student was still looking for alternative accommodation. Good luck to him.

Meanwhile four tourists tested in Rotorua are likewise shown the door, free to continue tripping around the country for the next fortnight while awaiting their results. Local health officials doubt they have the virus; but they don't actually know because, hey, that's what the tests are for, isn't it.

Bruce Bisset

So unfortunately when – not if – some bio-weapon sneaks out (as conspiracists have it novel Coronavirus might be, given a secretive Chinese bio-facility 30km from the Wuhan fish market epicentre), or a naturally-mutated mega-killer emerges (probably thanks to cross-species jump as a result of dumb humans trading wild game from areas rife with toxic contamination – again as per Wuhan), we are going to die, en masse.

But don't bother panicking; as is plain from the Government's pragmatism, there's nothing you can do.

Except buy a Lotto ticket, because you've got about as much chance of winning that as of being either infected or unaffected, depending on the virus' severity.

Welcome to the reality of disease in the 2000s.

Bruce Bisset is a freelance writer and poet. Views expressed are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's.