An “abundance of caution”, Australia’s new Labor Government sounds like ours a few years ago.
Here health officials held an urgent meeting with duty minister Stuart Nash in Wellington on Monday night. At least one local epidemiologist, Michael Baker, thought we should follow suit. So did Christopher Luxon.
He told Newstalk ZB that while National was not party to the official advice being given to the Government it was “obvious” New Zealand should follow others. “I think when you look at what other countries have actioned in the last 24-48 hours, that it is quite sensible for us to be putting some risk mitigation in place,” he said.
This is election year, Luxon’s instincts matter. I suppose when the reporter rang he thought this was the safest thing to say. But how hard would it have been to say that with tens of thousands of New Zealanders infected by the virus, a few more cases arriving from China would not matter much?
That’s what David Seymour said without being a party to official advice, just using his head. The European Union’s disease prevention agency said something similar, concluding extra measures were not needed because the Covid strains in China are variants of Omicron, which is now endemic in Europe as it is here.
We were perhaps fortunate that the minister minding the fort for the Government over New Year was the Minister of Tourism and Economic Development. Nash would have been keeping the Prime Minister and others close to their phones but as the conduit of information, he would have been more influential than usual.
Tourism and economic development post-pandemic are both good reasons not to discourage travel from China with compulsory tests unless there is a very good reason to do so.
The only reason the World Health Organisation was advocating pre-departure tests was to get a more reliable measure of the scale of the outbreak in China than the People’s Republic was providing. It is only a month since its Government gave up the attempt to stamp out Covid-19 and it is trying to hide the full consequences for a population with little immunity.
Data gathering is the essence of the WHO’s purpose and it is important, but it hardly justifies mandatory travel tests in these circumstances. The reason the US, UK and Canada have been willing to comply is probably so that the people of China will realise, contrary to the propaganda that we have been receiving from their Government for years, they are now in worse shape than the decadent west.
Tempting as it may be to confront Chinese with the failure of Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy, and possibly reinforce recent protests against his autocratic rule, it’s never a good idea to do so with false pretences.
It took our Government two and half days to decide not to follow our anglophone fellow countries but it was a good decision. It concluded there will be “minimal public health risk to New Zealand” when China allows its people to travel again from tomorrow, but gave a nod to the WHO’s data gathering needs with a renewed voluntary testing drive and tests of aircraft wastewater.
It feels like we have come full circle from this time three years ago, when a new coronavirus had appeared in China. At that time the WHO was not anxious for countries to close their borders. Rather, its mantra was, “testing, testing, testing”.
As a UN agency, it was looking for a universal response rather than every nation isolating itself from others. Border restrictions were not just selfish, they proved to be futile when the virus mutated to a form too infectious to be stopped, as viruses usually do.
China is the last country to learn that lesson. We don’t need another year of economic damage.
