Cloudy with a chance of lockdown, will the sun shine or not?

It appears as though the fear is being ramped up so restrictions can be enacted again. What does this mean for our summer ahead, are storm clouds gathering in the distance? What is the outlook for our nation, and could we expect our long-range forecast to be cloudy with a chance of lockdown? The beating of the lockdown drums appears to be getting louder. Hopefully, we are mistaken, and it is nothing more than summer waves beckoning us. But hope has not kept the advancing clouds at bay so far.

A spokesperson for New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science (NZDSOS) mentioned “we have been told about adverts for Contact Tracers, able to work full-time over Christmas and New Year. They haven’t been in business for months and there are other ad-hoc duties they are required to do. We wonder what those ‘ad hoc duties’ that they must be able to perform will include”.

As well as job advertisements the recent media update offered a gloomy outlook, as Dr Andrew Old, Dr Pete Watson and Chief Science Advisor Dr Ian Town deliberated about increasing case numbers, dire modelling predictions and uncertainty about how infections with the new variants would unfold.

Alongside the doom and gloom outlook, there was a ray of sunshine for those of Maori and Pacific heritage who can now look forward to their 4th jab if they are over the age of 40 years. The rest of the population needs to be over 50 years of age to access that fourth dose of medicine. Just a friendly FYI (for your information) good people, the government did purchase an awfully large number of doses for each of us – and we can’t have them going to waste!

The summer slogan ‘slip slop slap’ may very well soon have ‘shot’ tagged on the end as another summer ‘essential’ to keep us ‘safe’ over summer, or do we mean winter? Stating “the outlook for summer remains uncertain” we wonder if they have had a mental muddle moment and got their seasons mixed up? We note there was no mention of sunshine, sleep, vitamin D, exercise or other health and wellness recommendations during the briefing. Are they really health officials?

Dr Pete Watson said “global health systems were still facing significant challenges, and our own health system continued to experience pressure and high demand, hospital occupancy was high and so was the length of hospital stay. Staff sickness and vacancies were having an impact”. It appears we have a health system in crisis, and we have said it before, and we’ll say it again. We’re talking about the elephant that is…