Coronavirus Update #28

Here I am again with another covid update. Ugh. So soon. Saturday night at 9 pm, Jacinda announced that Auckland was heading back into Level 3 lockdown at 6 am on Sunday morning. We were out to dinner with friends when the announcement for the 9 pm press conference came out. As soon as we saw a post about Jacinda speaking at 9, we knew there was another lockdown in the immediate future. We ordered a particularly good bottle of wine and waited for the details. Who knows when we’ll be out for a nice dinner again.

This lockdown is especially frustrating because we’ve been in Level 1 for a week. Also, based on the chatter around the table, people are annoyed that the last lockdown wasn’t long enough, resulting in this rapid fire change in alert levels. People think that it would’ve been better to stay in lockdown longer two weeks ago to avoid this scenario, and I agree. It was pretty clear as one or two community cases popping up every day or so that this outbreak wasn’t completely under control. In the back of my mind, I felt like another lockdown was going to happen, though I hoped we’d get in at least a few full weeks of school first.

This lockdown is, unfortunately, the result of people not following New Zealand’s very clear covid protocol. The positive person went out in public while infectious even though they had orders to stay home and isolate. To think that the selfishness of one 21 year old is bringing an entire region to a standstill is annoying, frustrating, and infuriating. New Zealand has come together so well for the past year and there is fatigue setting in, but this type of behaviour is beyond what your average Kiwi would ever do.

So we’re at home for at least the next week. The new community case is the UK variant and tied to the Valentine’s Day cluster. The government is already setting the stage for there to be many more community cases as the extent of the spread comes to light. The general mood among our friends is that this lockdown could very well turn into a long, multi-week ordeal. We know that short, hard lockdowns work, so we’re willing to do it, but this one wasn’t a freak accident or some unforeseeable weakness in the border. It was straight up irresponsibility, and that makes it hard.