From Tim Cadogan – Central Otago’s Mayor
If one good thing has come out of this second national lockdown, it is to see record keeping finally becoming mandatory. I’ve been banging on about the importance of using the Covid tracing app for ages now and I still don’t understand the arguments I have had against it.
Firstly; I have been told that people don’t want “they” to know what their movements are.
Generally they tell me this while their cell phone sits next to them, which baffles me a bit.
The other common argument against the tracer app is that “there is no Covid is the South Island” (note, there still isn’t as I write this; I hope that’s the case when you are reading this). Have you seen the movie The Matrix, and the bit when Neo leans back and dodges the bullets? He dodges them before they get to him; because while it is really hard to dodge a bullet, it’s impossible to do so once they have got to you.
We dodged a bullet with the Wellington outbreak last month and a lot of that was put down to the visitor from Australia being a religious user of our tracing app. The same seems to apply to the man from Devonport who went to the Coromandel while unknowingly covid positive. Again, i’m writing this on Monday morning so i don’t know if we have dodged the latest bullet or not, but if we have, it will be in large part due to that diligence.
So once we are out of lockdown and we get to do those things like going for a coffee again, things that many parts of the rest of the world has struggled to do for 18 months or so, let’s just use the app or sign in and be grateful.
