Time for the Covid-19 review? The borders are open and Ashley Bloomfield has left, but the 'what next' question lingers

As of midnight, New Zealand's international borders opened completely – and delivered hope it marked a fullstop on the initial Covid-19 response.

In March 2020, the borders were the first thing to close. Now they are fully open again.

That tidily coincided with the last days of Dr Ashley Bloomfield as director general of health and so was something of a symbolic farewell to the Covid-19 response of yore.

The focus now is now is on the hangover those two years have left us with: the economic hit, the cost of living, the staff shortages, the health system creaking.

The bigger questions nobody really wants to ask are the what-next one and the what-if one.

What if something worse than Omicron happens upon us? Would a new, effective response be ready?

And what is next if there isn't a new variant?

The danger of a new variant is keeping the traffic light system in place and the red setting.

However, it is unclear how effective that would actually be: its rules are under review after officials decided the gathering limits would be of little to no use in the Omicron outbreak.

So what would be effective – and what would be acceptable?

It is equally unclear whether the green setting is still in play. We do not know what it would take to get there. Are we at orange for evermore?

Once upon a time – three months ago – Chris Hipkins was still the Covid-19 Response Minister and he talked about a comprehensive inquiry into the Covid-19 response.

Hipkins said then that they were not sure what winter would bring but "I think it is likely that at some point in the second half of this year, we will need to turn our minds to what a more formal review looks like".

It is now the second half of the year but last week Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson again said there will be a time for a full review, but it is not now.

The delay was justified by saying they did not want officials bogged down in reviewing the past instead of dealing with an ugly present.

That may be justified – but it should be soon.

The risk of election years is that they can paralyse governments from doing anything that might come back to hurt them at an inopportune time.

The inopportune time is just before an election. Politically, the last thing Labour will want is a reminder or awkward findings about its handling of the pandemic.

Hipkins acknowledged the need for some speed. He suggested it would be a Public Inquiry rather than a full-blown Royal Commission of Inquiry. Public Inquiries are more agile and faster.

However, as of this week there is still no indication of what shape a review might take, and when it might happen.

Government ministers – and Bloomfield – have all stuck by the decisions they made during the pandemic's first years. They have also added the caveat that those decisions were based on the information they had to hand at the time.

As Grant Robertson said, referring to a South Park character, Captain Hindsight was otherwise occupied over those two years.

But Captain Hindsight can be deployed now to work on the worst case scenario in the future – if the Government grabs him now.

That review would be valuable in re-assessing the decisions that were made, the practical difficulties in implementing them, the effectiveness of them and the longer-term consequences. It would be able to assess whether the cost of what was effective was worth it. It would give people who were left out of the decision-making due to the haste it had to happen with a chance to have that say.

There have been looks into various aspects of the response, from vaccines to the way MIQ operated. But they were done on the fly, while the things they were reviewing were still happening.

There may well be little appetite for trawling back over the decisions of the past by the Government.

Most accept New Zealand came out better off than most other countries, but the gratitude for that of 2020 swung to blame and anger by the end of last year. Restrictions, MIQ and mandates may have been effective at a time they were needed, but they also all came at a cost.

It has been a long time since it was the Prime Minister who fronted on a Covid-19 announcement. Her focus has moved to other areas of Labour's agenda as she tries to convince voters she deserves a third term.

It is an apparent attempt to break the association in the public eye between herself and Covid-19.

The Government is at pains to make the country feel as "normal" as possible, even while Omicron is still rolling through. "Normal" now includes Covid-19, accepting there is not much we can do about it - and not paying enough attention to the numbers dying of it.

The days of lockdowns, alert levels, walking in 3 metre circles around other people and closed shops feel as if they are a long time ago now.

The one threat to normal is the risk of a new, vicious variant.

The risk is surely reason to have the review now so hindsight from the earlier response can be applied to a potential future threat.