Page:New Zealand Parliament Hansard 2021-03-09.pdf/8

1154 Papatoetoe cluster the results were not good. S001, for members, is about the time from exposure to contact, isolation, and quarantine. The target is more than 80 percent within 96 hours. The achievement was 67 percent for Māori and 52 percent for non-Māori. S002 is about the time from case first symptom to contact, isolation, and quarantine. Again, the target’s more than 80 percent within 96 hours, and the achievement for this cluster was 75 percent for Māori and 62 percent for non-Māori. So the question for the Minister is: is he satisfied with those results, and what’s being done to improve them?

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I’m not satisfied with those results. I think it’s important to acknowledge, though, in both of those metrics, that not all of that is within the control of the contact tracing teams, because the ability to meet those targets really depends on being made aware of cases at the earliest possible opportunity. So if you think about the second metric that the member mentioned, the time between showing symptoms to a person being quarantined or isolated, that very much depends on people coming forward as soon as they show symptoms. In this particular set of cases, particularly the ones that we have dealt with most recently, there was evidence that people were showing symptoms for some time before they came forward and before they got tested, and therefore before they were identified. So those metrics would be thrown out. Similarly, with regard to the first one, we had examples there where people were not necessarily identified early enough in order to meet that first one. So that’s one of the challenges.

We are—with the review panel that I have announced today—going to be having another look at what the most appropriate metrics are, and I’ve had conversations with Dr Verrall already, because those metrics are very much designed for a system where there was transmission within the community. It was designed in a different context to the one that we’re dealing with now. Now we’re dealing primarily with cases that come through the border, and so we’ve got to have another look at whether those metrics are the most appropriate, because cases that come through the border, for example, they’ve often been infected well before they even arrive in New Zealand, before we could even hope to test them, and therefore the metrics would not accommodate that.

CHRIS BISHOP (National): The Minister makes a good point, I think, around the right communication going to people as to what they should do when they become symptomatic and what they should do around testing. That, I think, has been one of the things that many in the public have been alarmed about in the last two or so weeks, with the communication that has come from the Prime Minister down, in fairness, to the public around what the right messages are and what people should be doing. So I guess the question for the Minister is does he, on behalf of the Government, accept some responsibility for confusing messages around what people should and shouldn’t be doing, in particular in relation to the case of the KFC worker who we had the unedifying spectacle of the Prime Minister saying the judgment of the whole nation had to come down on that person—

Rt Hon Jacinda Ardern: That is not what I said about them—not about them.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well that is what you said, when—

SPEAKER: Order!

CHRIS BISHOP: —that person insists, to this day, that they simply followed Government instructions.

Hon CHRIS HIPKINS (Minister for COVID-19 Response): I think this was well canvassed last week, and my view is very similar to the Prime Minister’s, which is that there was certainly enough information that that person should have known that they needed to be at home, including the fact that they had been asked to be tested and hadn’t been, and that they had two members of their household who were showing COVID-19 symptoms, who had also been asked to be tested. There was a lot of communication from