August 31, 2020
More lockdowns inevitable as COVID lingers on
A member of the Māori pandemic response says people need to get used to the idea of switching up and down alert levels to deal with outbreaks of COVID-19.
Te Rōpū Whakakaupapa Urutā had pushed for Auckland’s Level 3 lockdown to be extended, but Dr Rawiri Jansen now says the extra restrictions added to the so-called Level 2.5 for the city should help mop up the end of the current cluster.
Dr Jansen, who has been appointed to a taskforce looking at how border security and quarantine is being implemented, says he would like to see primary and secondary healthcare move to a new model.
"We’re going to have outbreak and we go to the outbreak settings and then we throw the kitchen sink at it and get the job done and then we are going to turn it down and go back to a catch up phase. I just really hope everyone can see there is a period of time when we switch from one back to the other. I think that is our reality and everyone should get good at doing it," he says.
Dr Jansen says while there may be frustration over not being able to go back to a normal life, if New Zealand had not taken the elimination path the alternative would have been several thousand deaths and the breakdown of the health system and the economy.
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