Lest we forget: There has been a pandemic

It’s political, an attempt to change the narrative by barking on about “how terrible MIQ was”, “how slow our vaccination programme was”, “how the tourism industry was ruined, the border restrictions too tight, no staff, rising inflation, a divided nation” and so on. There seems to be a collective amnesia at work.

Can I just say, “We’ve been in a pandemic.”

It is an incredibly difficult thing to manage, balancing economic and social issues, against deaths. There is no way through a pandemic without economic impact; the countries that opened up and let the virus run, still had economic impacts, lengthy lockdowns, huge social costs and deaths.

Doctors know well the perils of the “retrospectoscope”, how easy it is to criticise looking back when you have the benefit of knowing what actually happened after the critical decisions were made using the information available and the context at the time.

Yes, our vaccination programme could have been quicker, but can you remember February 2021 when the UK started vaccinating? We had no community spread, they had heaving hospitals, stacks of body bags and nurses using rubbish bags because there was no PPE. Did Chris Bishop really think he could have muscled his way to the front of the worldwide vaccine queue?

In any case, even if we had been quicker, I doubt we could have avoided the 2021 Auckland lockdown, we couldn’t have got to 90 per cent before August; partly because we had no community transmission and the population were complacent, “I’ll be right, I’ll go next week”

We needed the arrival of Delta to get the population moving.

And MIQ was amazing. How did they set up that system so fast and have it so effective? MIQ is the main reason for our success; fewer deaths, less time in lockdowns, more time to get vaccinated. Sorry if it was inconvenient for some, it was a pandemic.

There is also a perception problem because when public health policies work, nothing happens and when nothing happens people only see the costs of the policy. The benefit of the policy is in all the deaths that didn’t happen.

We have had just over 2000 deaths due to COVID. If we had the COVID death rate of Sweden, a country much lauded by the libertarians in the early days for its policy of living with the virus, we would have had around 11,000 deaths in New Zealand.

If we had the UK death rate, we would have had around 16,000 deaths; the US death rate, 17,000 deaths.

How many deaths are okay?

Yes, business suffered and the mandates enraged people, but they are still alive and so are 15,000 other New Zealanders, who might have been your whānau.

It has been interesting going back through my stories and reflections and remembering. The emerging collective amnesia needs to be replaced with “lest we forget”. On that note, thank you again to the marvellous Dr Paul Trotman, whose documentary, Behind the Mask is a stark reminder of the harrowing realities of that first wave in 2020.

We totally dodged a bullet.

Lest we forget.

Lucy O’Hagan is a medical educator and specialist GP working in the Wellington region