It’s not just vaccinations and use of the Tracer app that need to improve before we can safely open the borders, he thinks – the Ministry of Health also needs to up its game. Dr Gorman says it was too slow to notify the public of the potential exposure in Wellington.
Despite knowing about the case on Tuesday night, it didn’t go public until Wednesday morning. By then most Kiwis had already heard about it via Australian media reports.
“Yesterday all those people went to work in Wellington who shouldn’t have gone to work – they should have been forewarned the previous evening,” said Dr Gorman. “The argument was ‘there’s a process we have to follow and we have to sort out the risk’ and so on. I don’t accept that. Just put the names out there, and if the next day you have to edit them, so be it.”
He said most people would have been okay with being told to stay home unnecessarily, if the alternative was going to work and potentially being exposed to the virus.
“We keep encountering these things as if it’s the first time we’ve encountered them as if there’s no plan, as if there’s no memory… We’re putting a very complex task on a bunch of bureaucrats who are used to doing policy work. I feel sorry for them – they’re simply not up to the job.”
