The charge nurse in our theatre just got a phone call from a debt collector.
They want to know where the money is for her stint in MIQ a few months ago. Sounds fair, except she was there to quarantine after being in Fiji for several weeks as part of a New Zealand military aid deployment, to help out when they were in the midst of a delta COVID wave. As such, her MIQ ought to have been paid by the ministry of health – because obviously the paperwork to just waive the fee is in the too hard basket. Should it worry us that everyone who has heard this story with any experience of the ministry of health is completely unsurprised, and just rolls their eyes? The general feeling seems to be, the ministry would struggle to organize it’s way out of a wet paper bag.
That being said, I will stick to my guns and say our government has done an almost perfect job with COVID management over the last two years. No matter how hard the opposition parties and the media try, they’re not getting any traction out of the current Rapid Antigen Test “controversy” at the moment. Apparently we are supposed to be horrified that the government are muscling in and taking away RAT that private companies had previously ordered. Trouble is, all the business representatives I’ve heard on the radio sound like they have very little comprehension of how this screening test fits into the overall scheme of keeping people at work. Give them into the hands of someone with some idea of public health, please!