Former Wayfare boss, TIA chair calls for scrapping of alert levels

7th May 2020 By Staff Reporter | news@tourismticker.com | @tourismticker

Former Wayfare boss and Tourism Industry Aotearoa chair Richard Lauder has called for the scrapping of alert levels arguing they were constructed for an upward path into lockdown, not for a move out and a restoration of economic activity.

Writing in LinkedIn, Lauder said that New Zealand had rapidly and sufficiently scaled-up its capability to manage and provide certainty around Covid-19 public health risks, so the focus should now shift to economic and financial risks and there was no longer any reason to restrict widespread freedom of movement.

Richard Lauder

Lauder, who left the Queenstown-headquartered tourism giant Wayfare in March after eight years at the helm, also made a case for rethinking border management suggesting a separation of how New Zealand operated with so-called “clean” countries versus “infected” ones, which could provide much-needed access to tourism and trade markets.

“In New Zealand, we established our Covid-19 Alert Level system, which I think was extremely useful for communicating concepts and educating the masses, but I also think it was constructed for an upward path into lockdown, not for a downward path out of lockdown,” Lauder said.

“On the path to level 4 we regularly strengthened border controls, ultimately moving up to mandatory quarantine. We were also scaling up our testing capacity… scaling up our contact tracing capacity and centralising our tracking systems.

“And we were sorting out communications, public safety systems and detailed assessment of our actual pandemic performance. And we are developing a contract tracing app (presumably we could just copy Australia’s). We were also educating the public on safe behaviour.”

“So today, as we sit in level 3, I would argue our public health risks are significantly lower than they were when we were in level 2 just 6 weeks ago.”

He added that border closures had stopped the source of any virus arriving from overseas, testing had provided a high level of certainty that there was no community transmission, there was full knowledge of active cases and significant daily testing and contact tracing capability.

“Given all these factors, why do we remain so tightly constrained? We have moved from a state of high uncertainty and low capability 6 weeks ago, to one of high certainty and high capability today,” he said.

“Our risk has reduced dramatically, but today we are acting like its worse. I would assert the public health risks today have swung wildly away from a Covid-19 risk to health and wellbeing risks associated with widespread and deep personal financial uncertainty and loss.”

Lauder urged that attention be moved “to where it’s deserved… let’s move forward on the economy.”

“There is no reason to be in level 3, 2 or 1, let’s rewrite the rules based on societal risk and safety today, taking full account of achievements and learnings of the last six weeks. I see no reason why we shouldn’t move back to widespread freedom of movement and economic activity.”

He went on to “break down the bad thinking” on border management.

“We really need to separate our management of borders into how we operate with ‘clean’ countries and how we operate with infected countries. Clean countries are ones that have been successful at heading down a path of elimination like us,” Lauder said.

“They have quarantine of their borders, they have a high level of certainty in their knowledge of every active case and every close contact, have gold standard contact tracing, a large capacity for testing, a high level of societal compliance and have very low numbers of cases in proportion to the population.

“Our uninfected population mixing with their uninfected population creates no more public health risk than NZ staying isolated, so there is no reason not to have open borders with other ‘clean’ countries. In fact, there is only upside as the economic benefits are enormous.”