Judith, 61, caller from Wellington

Diary of the last 8 hours

6.55am

A new day. Am about to get Siri to turn on the radio.

Will we hear that all disagreements have been set aside and the team of 5 million is ready to hit the field and run in the same direction, even in the rain?

7.20am

On the line is Judith Collins. So, no.

7.21am

Corin Dann asks her about testing at the border. 

I have discussed the matter with Dr Shane Reti and Dr Shane has said to me that the more frequent the testing is, the better, she says. It's a busy morning so there’s not time to also mention that Dr Shane is a Harvard man. But she faithfully conveys the information that he himself has been offering that, er, the current approach is, er, more or less right.

But, she goes on: the other thing Corin is…..the contact tracing has been left in some strange sort of situation where it's now estimated around 6% of people are actually using the Covid app.

Oh really, asks Corin, because it’s achieving the 80% target recommended by the Ayesha Verrall report and the epidemiologists seem quite happy the tracing is working well.

Well that's just nonsense isn't it?

Corin asks: What do you suggest we do?

Well Dr Shane who is now getting briefed on these matters (see!if she insists her man gets a briefing like she did last week well that jolly well ends up happening!) has been very clear that there is around about a 6% uptake of people using the Covid app on their phones.

(Jeff Howell of Hamilton, and Twitter, is about to begin typing: honestly she's more of a talkback caller than a leader-in-waiting.)

But, Corin objects, the Covid app was never presented as the be-all-and-end-all. The key mechanism has been those public health officers ringing people up, and that’s been stated from the outset.

Judith, 61, caller from Wellington: Right, well it's clearly been a fail. They can't tell us where this has come through the border can they? And now we've got two clusters.

Corin: So the contact tracing has failed?

Caller: Well it's very clear that the app that was not sold to the public, because it’s very hard to trace where it's come through the border.

Corin: But the government has never said it will be the be-all and end all.

Caller: So why do we have the app on the phone?

Corin: Because the government says getting details is an added bonus. It's always been presented that way.

Caller: So, Corin, people don't always keep the sorts of records that you and I no doubt keep, of where we are and who we are talking to...

Well fair enough point, without adequate records you can end up with digger drivers cutting off aviation fuel and causing dreadful disruption to hard working Kiwi Mum and Dad business owners eh. 

Perhaps what she's endeavouring to say in a way that Dr Shane might put it is: if the app was used by everyone in the country we'd be able to track the virus.

But perhaps Dr Shane would not say that, because he knows that the Covid app is for locating people who have inadvertently had contact by being in certain locations, rather than tracking the journey taken by the virus.

Trying to follow her reasoning can be like trying to fold a fitted sheet. You get one side right, then you come back around to the other side and you’re all over the show again. Also, is it possible she is not altogether at home with technology? Next slide, please. Here are some pictures I viralled off the computerphone to add to the vibe of what we’re hearing.

Caller from Wellington: It is very important that there are other options available, the government didn't look at those…

Hang on, I'm trying to fold a fitted sheet. Are you still saying you want to get everyone using the Covid app, or nah?

Caller: What I believe is that when Covid-19 comes in through the border that we have to have a system in place that immediately can find out where it has gone.

Also, because they don't yet have one, she says wait for their border policy to come out, including something on contract tracing:

We will be putting out policy in relation to this because we are being advised by Dr Shane and epidemiologists and virologists, the people who actually know what to do and we’re not just leaving it to Chris Hipkins, Megan Woods and Jacinda Arden.

Impressive. Presumably this would be a better bunch of epidemiologists and virologists than the ones currently advising the government. 

There are many more minutes, including the declaration in relation to the virus breaching our border, that she simply won’t let it happen. Presumably this will be done by standing at the passport gate declaring to each arrival: Bow down, puny virus. I am advised by Dr Shane, so you are dealing with a Harvard man. Good day to you sir, good day.

Maybe Sir Isaac Hooton could find her something to read out from Harry Potter as well.

7.45am

Elsewhere in the land of long white chaos, James is on the line from his MIQ hotel room and James is not too bad at all thanks. 

It’s a completely different world here. Where we came from, there had been 20,000 deaths, so it’s wonderful to come back to New Zealand and feel safe again.

This is what a North Korean regime would want us to believe of course. You can't fool Kate Hawkesby.

8.20am

Thinking about something various people have been saying, including the pop-up leader of the opposition in that earlier phone-in: We can’t go yoyo-ing in an out of lockdown.

Wonder if she has made herself familiar with what Professor Rod Jackson set out yesterday, namely, we have just two choices and there are no others unless an effective vaccine is developed or the virus mutates into something less serious:

1: An efficient testing, contact tracing and isolation system to stamp out new outbreaks rapidly by identifying infected people before they infect others.

2: A four- to six-week lockdown to stamp out the virus, as we did a few months ago.

If we want more of 1 and less of 2, then the last line of defence is each one of us. The last line of defence is the simple stuff we can each be doing: put on masks, keep up the distancing, keep up the hand washing, stay home if we’re sick, get tested. And get the phone app and use it.

The more we do our bit, the better the odds of tilting the calculation, you’d think.

9.30am

Would usually on this day at this hour be at the gym doing a Power class. But there is no gym in level 3 so I’m at home reading Twitter.

9.31am

Cannot read about boiled eggs without seeing Robert De Niro being Mephistopheles in Angel Heart and peeling one slowly while he scares the tripe out of Mickey Rourke like he can do whatever the fuck he wants and no virus can stop him.

10.50am

A few days ago I wrote here about  taking rides from strangers and being in the cubs and somebody said you ought to alert people before you start talking about your woggle.

This reminded me of an email I got from someone just a few pages into my book Bullrush who described the tale on the fourth page of the book as a deeply disturbing piece of Feilding gothic.

Well why stop at one woggle. Here, have an excerpt, you’re welcome.

The playground can be a mystery. You watch the big kids, you listen, you try to make sense of it. Something happens spontaneously, a game  begins, no-one really explains it, you just follow their lead, you go where it seems you have to, you run when it seems you have to run, you yell when you think you’re supposed to do that.

You have not the first idea what they're doing and what you’re supposed to do.

The first time I saw a boy get the strap, I was standing at the end of a line of six with my hand out. You follow the bigger kids, you take their lead. After swimming, in the changing sheds, when the big boys asked if we knew how to milk the cow we said yes, but it turned out to be nothing like we’d seen it done before. I don’t remember now whether we each had hold of our own penis or whether the big boys were holding them for us, but when he looked in to find out what was taking us so long the headmaster seemed to think we were doing it entirely the wrong way, and it seemed to matter quite a lot. 

We stood in his office and he came down the line, each of the bigger boys getting six of the best. The office was quiet and each slap was startlingly loud. He stopped at the boy before me. We were free to go. I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. It became clear enough in time. My mother returned to teaching after 14 years and discovered the children were using new and unfamiliar slang. She asked us one night, “What’s a wanker?”

So much of what passes from kid to kid is never written down, never entered in any book. The ball remains perpetually in the air. The swear words, the games, the rules - all of them pass from one to the next. There was no book of rules for bullrush, no Bullrush Annual, no trophy. But year after year, it got passed along, and you played your first game of bullrush just by following the others, taking your place at the line alongside them and waiting to see what happened next.

1.30pm

Watching the 1.00 press conference and thinking I might as well just put here what Deane wrote to me this morning because he's dead on the money.

It makes me think of two things - when I worked in the health system we had a "no blame" reporting system. It had evolved to that because in the old system of incident reporting a nurse, for instance, might be suspended on the third incident report so if they were already on two, they'd be less likely to "fess up" if something happened on their watch. With this mentality, systems are examined less and refinements are not able to be made to systems to make them safer. The point being that safety systems evolve and you need "buy in" from participants. With a "no blame" system, participants are encouraged to report even near-misses so that those overseeing the systems can evolve the systems to prevent an actual occurrence. 

I can see the same in civil aviation -  CAA has the SMS (safety management system) certification where operators put together an SMS for their organisation - one of the important components of an SMS is buy-in - so the senior persons need to have a culture in their operation where people aren't afraid of coming forward with concerns.

This current situation with managed isolation is a system that's been pulled together - it hasn't had a huge amount of opportunity. It's a critical environment (like an airliner or a surgical procedure) where a single mistake is serious and systems need constant monitoring and participants need to be involved and a culture needs to be in place to allow them to contribute to its refinement.

There's some weird expectation that this needs to be perfect from the get-go - even though other critical environments have taken decades to refine their processes to achieve a high level of safety.

2.23 pm

Just waiting to see what happens next really.