New Zealanders have spoken of the impact of the Covid-19 response on their lives and businesses, including crippling financial losses, children falling behind in schooling and struggles to farewell dying loved ones.
Public hearings for the second phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic response began in Auckland this morning.
The second phase is focusing on the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2021, the approval of vaccines and their safety, and the vaccine mandates in 2021 and 2022.
Video testimonies were played this morning of individuals who were particularly affected by the Government’s pandemic response.
Nadia Thompson, from Auckland, said she was working fulltime in a corporate role during the pandemic while also trying to care for three children, aged 5, 9 and 11.
Her husband was running a retail business in Manukau, which sold paint and household supplies.
The store was forced to close when the Government imposed the Level 4 lockdown in 2020, and was losing $15,000 a week during this period.
Thompson said the wage subsidy did not cover the full cost of paying staff. Her husband paid staff the living wage and despite workers agreeing to take a 20 per cent pay cut, they were still making big losses every week.
There were huge disruptions when staff could not work for two weeks because another family member was sick. As a result, her husband worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Meanwhile, the children were not in school and the parents were busy, so they spent lot of time on devices: “The effect is very real from that period,” she said, noting that they had fallen behind in their education.
In late 2021, Thompson was told that her mother, who had lung cancer, was close to death.
She travelled in full personal protective equipment (PPE) to Christchurch, where she was “treated like a leper” by her family members who warned they would “run out the back door” if she turned up at their house.
She was able to say goodbye to her mother in person in a rest home, while wearing full PPE. But she said many others did not get this opportunity during the pandemic.
“There was a way to do this safely,” she said. “One of the cruellest and most inhumane policies of the response was not allowing loved ones to be there when their family died.”
Thompson said future pandemic responses should be more risk-based and focus on protecting the vulnerable while allowing schooling to continue and small businesses to operate.
Lisa Barnett spoke of the stress of trying to work and run a business in Waikato in 2021 while border checkpoints were in place to enter and leave Auckland.
She was working at a health centre, Tuakau Health, and the family was running a refrigeration business in North Waikato.
She said checkpoints at the borders were initially easy to navigate but became more difficult over time. The company’s trucks sometimes waited up to three hours to get through the border, even when paperwork had been completed.
Customers became grumpy about late deliveries and the long waits took their toll on her husband and son, who worked for the company.
She said they later moved house during the pandemic but were then told by authorities they could not move properties.
“They changed the rules overnight,” she said. “By the time the moving day had come, they had changed again. It was so stressful.”
In opening the hearing today, chairman Grant Illingworth KC said the inquiry commissioners had received 31,000 public submissions, reviewed thousands of Government documents, and interviewed key decision-makers.
Key individuals, including Government ministers and officials, will appear in a public hearing next month.
The second phase of the inquiry was initiated in an agreement by the coalition parties in Government after the 2023 election.
The first phase of the Covid-19 inquiry wrapped up last year.
Commissioners in that inquiry concluded that the vaccine mandates were “reasonable” for specific professions in 2021 but were applied “more broadly than envisaged” in late 2021 and the case for them weakened once Omicron became the dominant variant of Covid-19.
They also said lockdowns were an effective tool for managing elimination, but the Government should have considered a broader range of factors in their decision-making in relation to the longest lockdown, in late 2021.
Isaac Davison is a senior reporter who covers Auckland issues. He joined the Herald in 2008 and has previously covered the environment, politics, social issues, and healthcare.
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