`Listen only to us'

Chris Hipkins should be incandescent, not frustrated and disappointed. Photo / NZ Herald

The government is right to insist that when it comes to Covid-19 news and advice, it should be regarded as the sole source of the truth. Most of us would accept that, on the proviso, of course, that what it is giving us is indeed the truth. That is becoming increasingly difficult to accept, given the mounting evidence that it has not been doing so.

The chinks began appearing weeks ago, after revelations that assurances from on high regarding the availability of PPE and flu vaccinations were aspirational, to coin the phrase du jour, than founded on the truth. It's all still a bit murky, in that genuine shortages and distribution problems continue to compete for our attention, but the inescapable conclusion is that those assurances were designed to placate us.

The problem with shutting down the critics in this day and age is that officialdom is no longer our only source of information. If nature abhors a vacuum, so too does the internet, and social media have never been slow to fill in any gaps. Therein lies another problem.

Social media provide the perfect environment for rumour, innuendo and the blatant sowing of every whacko conspiracy theory that anyone with an overpowered imagination can come up with. The difficulty lies in telling the difference between lunacy and genuine, well-sourced information. That is becoming increasingly difficult.

Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters provided fertile ground for that last week when he told Australian media that the re-emergence of Covid-19 here was the result of a quarantine breach. Hard to believe it could be anything else, but the fact that this came from a man who regularly scorns the media, and credited a journalist as his source, perhaps gave it credence. Within hours that was followed by 'revelations,' disseminated via social media, that the woman at the centre of the outbreak had visited a recent deportee from Australia, in quarantine, and had become infected.

That would certainly amount to a breach of quarantine, but that does not make Peters' story true. Prima facie it is believable though, given the obvious difficulty the government is having in sealing our borders, despite its insistence from the outset that the quarantining process, and the self-isolating process that preceded it, were the best they could be.

We now know that this wasn't the case. People who statistically had every chance of being infected were being let loose among us without self-isolation, and, even after managed quarantining was introduced, were being discharged without testing. The 'fact' that we racked up 64 days without a single case of Covid-19 lost all credibility once the testing we had been told was being carried out actually began, and started producing small numbers of cases on a daily basis.

One does not need social media to come to the conclusion that Covid-19 might have been seeping into this country unnoticed for 64 days. It is impossible to believe otherwise.

Even managed quarantining has been problematic. Quite apart from those people who managed to escape before being cleared of infection, we have heard stories of quarantine keepers and kept mixing and mingling without regard for the potential spread of infection, of hospital nurses moonlighting at quarantine hotels, and of a man allegedly breaking into quarantine and leaving again, and being arrested 150km away.

It would be a very trusting individual who accepted, without question, that the people charged with stopping Covid-19 at the border are doing that job well, or that a civil service that is not renowned for high levels of competence would suddenly become so in a crisis. One does not need to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that our Covid-19 measures stumbling along, and that the re-emergence of the virus was always a matter of when rather than if, not because of the rates of infection overseas but because those whose job it is to keep it out aren't doing that job very well.

This view became even more compelling last week, after revelations that many of those people working at the border weren't being tested, as we had been told they were. Health Minister Chris Hipkins accepted responsibility for that, but, worryingly, said he had only been sharing information that he had been given.

We might want to believe the Minister of Health, the Director-General of Health, the Prime Minister and others when they look us in the eye and tell us that something is being done, but we have to remember that they are only as good as the people who are giving them that information. Increasingly we have reason to question the veracity of that advice.

Last week Hipkins admitted that 40 per cent of all managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) staff working at the country's main quarantine centre were not being tested at least once a week. It appeared that testing had not been happening at the rate the government had been asking for, or at the level he had been told was happening. Someone lied. And if they lied about one hotel, have they lied about others? We have no way of knowing, yet, but it would be a trusting soul who believed that one hotel was not like the others. And it would be a forgiving soul who did not think back almost two months to government assurances that there would be "regular health checks and asymptomatic testing of all border-facing workers."

Hipkins, meanwhile, expressed frustration and disappointment over the fact that he had been misled. He should have been incandescent, but for now, frustrated and disappointed will have to do. And he's not about to shine the spotlight on this gross dereliction of duty (not his words). There would be plenty of time to determine what went wrong - he and we know what went wrong - but this was not the time to be pointing fingers, he said. There was a bigger job to be done.

Fair enough, but hopefully he isn't thinking about this debacle blowing over. Time is not only a great healer. It is also a marvellous antidote to anger.

It's always easier in opposition, of course, and National leader Judith Collins wasn't quite as forgiving as Hipkins. It was unthinkable, she said, that such incompetence had been allowed to go on, putting at risk all the gains of weeks of national lockdown. She described the lack of testing at managed isolation facilities as "staggeringly unacceptable."

It's her job to attack the government, but it's difficult not to agree with that.

Hipkins, to be fair, hasn't been the Minister of Health for long, and might well be justified in claiming that he has been doing everything he possibly can to ensure the testing expected was being done. In June, however, the Ministry of Health revealed that 54 people had left a facility on compassionate grounds without first testing negative, a supposedly non-negotiable prerequisite, and that people in managed isolation or quarantine were not being tested as we had been told they were. It appears that only 800 of the 2159 people who left MIQ facilities between June 9 and 16 have ever been tested.

If we dodge this Covid-19 bullet it will be thanks to good luck rather than good management. In the meantime, we, many of whom wonder if we still have jobs and businesses in a week's time, a month's time, a year's time, are warned to stay away from other sources of information.

The pity is that when it comes to talking rubbish, social media do not seem to have the monopoly.