This is the other scandal going on - If you reside in care homes or assisted living places you have essentially been pressured to agree on a "Do Not Resuscitate" approach if you catch it. If you live in your own accommodation then you are slightly higher up the pecking order but will still struggle to get an ambulance response. Italy and Spain were swamped and so had to make these sort of hard triage decisions, but the UK had prior notice and should have prepared better. When this is all over there will have to be a complete re-think of social care because people will refuse to put their relatives in care homes when the respective death rates get published.
There are some great privately and publicly run old peoples homes out there, and the sector has been badly let down by the DHSC with the absence of PPE. However the whole "Herd Immunity" approach seems to have created, in some, a culture of being happy to abandon people over a certain age for the sake of the economy. This will not be forgotten and has been totally shown up by New Zealand.
New Zealand;
- Has about 4m people
- Only one City over 500,000 people
- No high density housing
- No mass public transport system
- Its nearest neighbour is a 4 hour flight away
- Has little daily travel that sees people leave their towns and neighbourhoods
- No pub culture
- An almost impossible to appreciate culture for the outdoors
- Very low levels of social interaction in those over 25
- Doesn’t have a single nightclub of the size most would define as a ‘Club’
With regards to just Auckland, a City of 1.5m;
- Walk into any bar in The City at any time of year and you’ll almost certainly find a table and as many chairs as you like.
- Almost everyone drives a personal car
- Many walk to work
Now I’m not suggesting it’s some backwards place that doesn’t have a social side, but it’s so different. It’s a tiny place at the bottom of the world and was uniquely placed to handle it well.
That they have, is still to their credit. I worried for them. They have illnesses like Strep & Rheumatic Fever that still run rampant there. Their healthcare is good, but they had nothing like the capacity needed to control an outbreak. I thought they had a bullseye painted on them, but thankfully Jacinder got shit together early.
I won’t let anyone hold them up as an example of how to do it though. There were elements of luck involved at the outset. Had they had 20 people get off a cruise ship and go back to an elderly community or two, they would have seen many dead there. Some of the things that make it such a frustrating country to live in, have worked to its benefit.
It hasn’t all been down to a well led and coordinated Government response. Though Jacinder and Labour have been close to perfect since their first measures were rolled out. Don’t kid yourself that she could have done that here though.
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