Throwing away our cheese

Back in 2020, Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris published a catchy graphic on The Spinoff on the Swiss Cheese Model of public health, with various policy interventions as slices of (holey) cheese. Stack up enough slices, and its harder and harder for covid to get through the holes. Except for the past few months - ever since the introduction of the "traffic light" system, covid policy hasn't been a matter of stacking up slices, but of ripping them out and throwing them on the floor. Traffic lights. Opening the border and ditching MIQ. Sacking the contact tracers. And today, the government has taken out another few slices, by effectively ditching gathering limits, scanning in, vaccine passes, and vaccine mandates. And they're not doing this at a time when the covid risk has decreased, but in the middle of our biggest outbreak, when people are still dying. As a result, the model now looks something like this:

("Something like" because this is based on the pre-vaccination graphic. The version which shows vaccines and masks doesn't show a bunch of the other stuff).

The Prime Minister says that these changes will mean that we will have a baseline caseload of "potentially several thousand cases a day" when the current wave is over. In other words, more covid than we had in the first wave, when we all locked down, and more than we had in the Delta wave, when we all locked down again. That caseload is going to mean ongoing, constant deaths, and an increasingly large number being disabled from long covid. But clearly Labour is fine with that now. Some of us may die, but its a sacrifice they're willing to make to pander to the increasingly sociopathic hospitality industry.

I remember when the government was kind, and was obviously doing its utmost to keep us all alive. That is clearly no longer true. This is a policy of stochastic murder. And we should hold the government accountable for it at the next election.