Auckland is in level three lockdown, and all other areas of New Zealand at the present time are in level two.

These differing levels of lockdown have proved to be very difficult to manage when it came down to it. The NZ Police were tasked with setting up roadblocks to enforce the lockdown rules but it seems that there was no realistic planning in place prior to this being enacted.

There were many instances of people using back roads to leave Auckland and it was not for some days before the Police managed to isolate the Auckland region to prevent unauthorised travel to and from the area.

This lockdown also bought with it problems of how to manage the movement of essential freight into and out of the city when the roads were clogged with private vehicles.

Many of those in private vehicles were workers needing to enter the Auckland region for work purposes. Many employed in essential industries that live in dormitory suburbs outside the boundaries set up by the police.

There were huge delays caused by the roadblocks and the need to check reasons for travel when in fact by shifting the boundaries a little further out this could have been reduced considerably. We are informed that over the first few days there were checks of approximately 60,000 vehicles and only about 2,200 turned back.

It is only right that those turned back at the regions border should have been, but the delays caused by the process of checking all vehicles meant that freight was held up for many hours in traffic queues.

This whole process of isolating the Auckland region has also highlighted the fact that Northland becomes by default also in level three lockdown due to the inability of any persons transiting through the Auckland region to go into Northland and the inability of any person from Northland transiting into the Auckland region.

For a government that supposedly had done all the planning over the preceding period from the time that the lockdown restrictions at level four were removed, this whole process of putting just the Auckland region into level three has been an absolute shambles.

In my opinion if this is an example of a government planning ahead for this type of eventuality as they stated that they had done, then all it showed was the ineptitude of those who carried out that planning.

It seems to me that we did not learn much from the initial lockdown as we seem to have just re-invented the wheel and put some different corners on it and are merrily driving down the road wondering where the bumps are coming from.

And as if it is not bad enough to find that after 100 odd days Covid free we have got community transmission of the virus, the government has no idea how it got here.

Our Prime Minister tells us that it doesn’t really matter if we don’t know how it got here as long as we can do contact tracing and contain the cluster we will be OK.

I don’t think so. If we don’t find out the source of this outbreak then we can never be sure when the next one is coming. Surely the border quarantine as they were at great pains to tell us was going to prevent this from occurring. Although it seems that that message has now changed.

Well I don’t think that you have to be an Einstein to work out that if you have a virus that has an incubation period of about fourteen days and you have been free of that virus for over 100 days, then it had to have come over the border and therefore the quarantine did not prevent this happening.

We then ask ourselves why did the quarantine not work.

The answer we get is a confusing hash of information that when examined under the spotlight of public opinion tells us that a large amount of detail that we were given by the government in relation to the quarantine and the testing regime that went with that, was not actually right.

A lot of the statements made about testing of those in quarantine and those that had to manage the quarantine sites were in fact wrong. The testing was simply voluntary and in some cases we are told it was refused for some of the quarantine workers.

It is time somebody decided to stand up and let the public of NZ know the facts and details around this whole quarantine saga instead of staying silent and letting rumour and disinformation obfuscate the truth and dodge the blame for poor planning and performance.

It is time this government and the bureaucrats that serve it were reminded of the

“FIVE P’s” : PROPER PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE

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