Traffic Lights

The traffic light system, along with restrictions on gatherings, should be dumped immediately.

Current Policy

The Framework, or traffic light system, was introduced on 22 November. At that time the Delta variant was the focus of all people’s attention. Omicron was officially designated a variant of concern four days later. The Framework consists of several elements that are more or less strict depending on the traffic light colour.

The elements are crowd size limits, vaccination requirements, the use of vaccination certificates, record keeping, and the potential for localised lockdowns.

At the Red setting, crowds in any setting are effectively limited to 100 people with vaccination certificates, or 25 people without, while close contact businesses cannot operate at all without the use of vaccine certificates.

At the Orange setting, crowds of 50 are allowed without the use of vaccine passes, and unlimited crowds if vaccine passes are checked. Close proximity businesses are not allowed to operate without checking vaccine passes.

At the Green setting, record keeping is required but there are no limits for activities where vaccination certificates are used. Without vaccination certificates, gatherings are generally limited to 100 people.

There is no differentiation between indoor and outdoor events, so an event at Eden Park has the same attendance limit as a wedding in a small chapel.

Potential Benefits

The issue of record keeping and contact tracing has been addressed elsewhere, as has vaccine requirements. The remaining feature of the COVID-19 Protection Framework is the limitation on gathering sizes.

By reducing the number of people at a venue, when a person is infectious they will infect fewer other people. There appears to be no modelling to predict how strong this effect will be for Omicron. We can conclude that restricting crowd sizes will somewhat slow the spread of Omicron, and therefore “flatten the curve”, reducing the peak demand on hospital capacity.

The question of how much has not been modelled or provided by Government for Omicron. Modelling from Te Punaha Matatini in late January did not explore this possibility, largely focusing instead on the rate of booster uptake.

Restrictions on large gatherings appear to belong in earlier phases of the pandemic, when overall case numbers were small. In those times, when we were focused on elimination, a “superspreader” event could change whether an outbreak was controlled or uncontrolled.

Like many things, Omicron appears to be changing the game. In an environment where a large number of people have the virus, there are more exposure events and a single exposure event will make less difference when there are many.

Altogether, restrictions on events will likely reduce the spread of Omicron by an unspecified amount.

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Costs

The costs of event restrictions are the events that might have gone ahead were it not for restrictions. Any event that would have had more than 100 people has been cancelled, with event promotors losing millions of dollars and the public losing out on millions of dollars of enjoyment. Private events such as weddings have had to be cancelled and delayed. People are missing their way of life.

One way to count the cost of event restrictions is to consider payouts under the Government’s major events insurance scheme. The scheme only covers events with more than 5,000 attendees, meaning events with between 101 and 5,000 attendees are not covered. In spite of that limitation, in November the Government budged $200 million for compensating events. At the time of writing, two events had made a successful claim from the Events Transition Support Payment Scheme, totalling $2.8 million. Given that many more than two events have had to be cancelled, we expect there will be many more payouts, giving a proxy for a fraction of the cost of event cancellations.

These losses cannot be easily quantified but we know they are large, widespread, and likely into the hundreds of millions of dollars at minimum.

Conclusion

The Government has dashed large events and hospitality businesses at enormous cost with little consideration for what the benefits might be. If they have cost-benefit analysis for this decision, they have not presented it. We have been asked to accept these restrictions with no idea whether they will leave us better off or by how much.

Unless the Government can show the benefits of restricting large events in an Omicron environment, in terms of reducing the peak demand on hospital capacity, the traffic light system should be dumped immediately so we can all move on.

LET'S Move On.

Traffic Lights

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LET'S MOVE ON