Our COVID response

Back to COVID seriousness now. It's been a frustrating week where we've seen the Delta variant now escape Auckland and head out to other parts of the country.

The government has been in a difficult position. This past week has seen some loosening of restrictions where people are now allowed to meet outdoors outside of their bubbles. There has been sustained pressure by the “open up” groups and, while it may have been advisable to continue the lockdown longer to attempt to stamp out COVID, they had to take account of behaviour of the public and its response to the lockdowns.

The key to getting out of this COVID mess is to get everybody vaccinated. We've made some good progress, but we're not there yet.

@farmgeek on Twitter continues to put together great graphs. This one shows where we're at with vaccination.

Remember the people who can't be vaccinated - including around 700,000 children under 12, and the immunocompromised. Those are the people we put at risk by opening up too early and allowing the virus to circulate.

As I write this on Sunday afternoon, there's 60 new cases today. This is not heading in the right direction, and unfortunately looks like it might be getting out of control. It's certainly looking like the decision to loosen off might well have been a mistake. I certainly hope we can get things under control again, but at some point it becomes impossible.

Lastly on COVID this week, I'm wondering at what point the anti-vaxxers will break, and realise it's in their own self-interest to get vaccinated. I wouldn't mind betting that there are some prominent anti-vaxxers who are secretly vaccinated. Ironically, they're been protected so far by our collective response to COVID. But I think it's only a matter of time before one of them will become infected, as we've seen overseas. (At which point, I'll have to suppress my schadenfreude! I wonder if there's a drug for that?!)