by Geoffrey Churchman
An article today on the heavily government-subsidized Newsroom website by Anuja Nadkarni asserts: “Covid-19 infected workers could sue bosses over poor health and safety.”
But it’s an extremely weak argument — how many successful such claims have there been for people who claimed to have caught the flu at work? How could they prove that was where they caught the infection? Unless maybe, the air conditioning system wasn’t properly maintained and it could be demonstrated that was the employer’s fault.
Generally, if the employer could be shown to have been willfully negligent on a health matter — like the KCDC and the mold in the former Waikanae library issue — a case could be argued. In that instance, however, although staff did complain of symptoms from it, there were fortunately no serious illnesses (at least from what we know.)
And in the case of the China virus, what about employees who have been jabbed with the so-called “vaccine” and still get the virus somewhere as has happened many, many times overseas? The Pfizer substance doesn’t stop transmission.
As we know from thousands of cases, if they have any symptoms at all, most people have the experience of a regular influenza which they recover from in a few days. Some, maybe 7-8%, need to be put in a hospital for a time but that happens/happened with regular flu too.
The case for direct employee compensation awards are extremely difficult with our ACC laws anyway.
Again, it’s obvious that this is just a part of the Jacinda government’s relentless scaremongering.
Your statement “as we know from thousands of cases, if they have any symptoms at all, most people have the experience of a regular influenza which they recover from in a few days” seems to imply that catching COVID may be no worse than getting the flu.
While COVID symptoms may be similar to the flu, the mortality rate of COVID-19 is thought to be substantially higher (possibly 10 times or more) than most strains of the flu.
The low number of deaths in NZ (5th lowest in the world per population) is only because of the policies of the Labour government in locking down the country early, and more recent efforts to restrict people’s movements and increase vaccination rates to slow down the spread of COVID. As COVID does spread we can expect mortalities to rise similar to other countries’ experiences.
The Health Foundation in UK use a common measure ‘years of life lost’ to debunk 3 common myths:
Myth 1: ‘Those who die from COVID-19 would have died soon anyway’ – people who died with COVID-19 lost on average 10.2 years of life.
Myth 2: ‘It’s just a bad flu season’ – Flu life years lost were a sixth of the life years lost to COVID-19.
Myth 3: ‘COVID-19 is the great leveller – we are all equally at risk’- people from deprived areas were more likely to die from COVID.
https://www.health.org.uk/publications/long-reads/one-year-on-three-myths-about-COVID-19-that-the-data-proved-wrong
New Zealand’s ICU capacity is not high by world standards and if increasing numbers of COVID patients overwhelm the health system, then elective surgery or lower priority health needs will be delayed or cancelled.
Dear P (for Propagandist?), your Leader was not particularly quick in Locking down in March last year; it’s clear that she wanted to indulge in more virtue signaling in her hijab at the first anniversary of the mosque shooting, but was firmly told by MoH officials she couldn’t and had to organise a Lockdown quick. Queensland’s Minister of Health (also in a Labor government by the way) states that it’s inevitable that everyone is going to get covid as the ‘vaccines’ don’t prevent transmission — but she believes the ‘vaccine’ will make the experience less severe for people — link to the 7 News report below.
However, there are better alternatives to the ‘vaccines’ that were rushed through without proper long term evaluations last year. That doesn’t exclude the possibility that something will be developed that meets the safety and effectiveness criteria as research continues. There are plenty of counter statistics to the ones you repeat from the UK website, we’re not going to bother in this response, you’ll find them in previous posts. Yes, your Minister of Health has done nothing about increasing the number of ICU beds; that’s exactly what National spokesperson Shane Reti said this week. Btw can you tell us why Hipkins fronts the podium in your leader’s press conferences rather than Andrew Little? Is it because Little is hopeless? https://7news.com.au/lifestyle/health-wellbeing/were-all-going-to-get-it-qld-health-chief-issues-grim-covid-warning-as-she-raises-alarm-on-nsw-border-plan–c-4243225