Society

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A story about you, your two-year-old daughter, and hot girls everywhere.

Do you want your two-year-old to be hot?

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'Creating something beautiful out of something that was very, very ugly.'

The embroidery project healing the pain of March 15, stitch by stitch

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Our son died with the people who loved him best, comfortable and with the care he needed. Yet this happened in spite of, not because of, the hospital system. 

Finding palliative care for our baby in a ‘luck of the draw’ health system

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It’s a response that has nothing to do with children and everything to do with adults.

Watching Adolescence made me glad I don’t have kids

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I've worked hard to cut negative self-talk out of my life. How do I stop my friend from picking up the slack?

Help Me Hera: My friend keeps putting me down ‘as a joke’

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No insulation, flaking paint, questionable pipes and all my old furniture and artwork. At the auction, bidding was competitive. 

My crummy old flat, with my crummy old furniture, just sold for $1,980,000

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Yes, it's flat, but there's another crucial reason why so many Christchurch residents ride.

What has Christchurch done right to get so many people on bikes?

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'I'm frivolous with the small stuff, stingy and considered with anything that has 00 or more on the end.'

The cost of being: A ‘secure but spontaneous’ 40-something public servant

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The village of Partyzanske, like so many others, has been devastated by war. Tasha Black meets the women determined to rebuild it.

‘If a village has children, it has a future’: The Ukrainians returning home during war

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Hectic Zoom parties, distanced neighbourly singalongs and wearing rubber gloves to pat dogs: it was all weirdly normal five years ago.

Remember this? A collection of warm and cursed memories from the first lockdown

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Most people would look at our house and decide painting it was a job for professionals. My mum and dad decided it was a job for their kids.

The best job I ever had was painting a house

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'You don’t have to be at your best, you can even come at your worst.'

Pacific profiles: Meet the 22-year-old run club leader in South Auckland

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With no hospital or after-hours clinic and an eight-week wait to see a GP, locals worry Upper Hutt is 'falling through the cracks'.

Upper Hutt is on the rise, but its healthcare has never been worse

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Synonymous with speedway racing since 1929, Western Springs Speedway is finally closing down.

Western Springs Speedway’s final race after 96 years

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I've been turned down once. Should I confess my love again?

Help Me Hera: Am I in love with my best friend, or am I overthinking it?

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It's costly, invasive and most eggs never end up being used, but 'eggsurance' is increasingly common. Is it worth it?

What’s behind the rise in egg freezing?

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'Three words to describe my financial situation? Broke, depressing, unliveable.'

The cost of being: An unemployed 31-year-old who wishes he could afford good food

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Seven people have died on the Wellington waterfront since 2006. What should be done about it?

Windbag: The conundrum of the Wellington waterfront fences

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Step one: find suppliers. Step two: get your shipment out of the West Bank.

How (and why) to start a Palestinian boutique

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The highs, lows and silver linings of single-parenting a toddler.

The Spinoff Essay: All my daughter’s daddies

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Including Aotearoa’s first musical sitcom and a must-watch documentary about one of the darkest chapters in our history. 

New to streaming: What to watch on Netflix NZ, Neon and more this week

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'I've seen hundreds of kiwi, and every time I see one I'm still going to cry.'

Nicola Toki wants Aotearoa to fall in love with nature again

Jo Smith

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How awakening traditional practices is restoring Rēkohu now and for the future.

‘Not like the rest of New Zealand’: reviving ta rē Moriori on Rēkohu

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An unflinching new documentary exposes how state care became a weapon of colonisation in Aotearoa.

Review: The Stolen Children of Aotearoa is confronting but essential viewing

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 All options are on the table including a breakup of the duopoly.

Willis gets serious about supermarket competition

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It’s tried and failed before. But maybe this time things are different.

Can Auckland Council finally do the impossible and get rid of one (1) golf course?

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New Zealand's national parks are free to access, but that could be set to change. 

The proposed changes to DOC land – and the reaction to them – explained

We must act quickly, with no half-measures. Dr Siouxsie Wiles explains why, with illustrations by Toby Morris.

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The Spinoff’s ongoing expert-led, evidence-based coverage of Covid-19 is funded by Spinoff Members. To support this work, 

Spinoff cartoonist Toby Morris and I recently introduced you to the concept of 

. Now we want to get you thinking about a more ambitious idea: #StopTheSpread.

But first, a quick recap. During an outbreak, if we can’t control the spread of the disease, then the number of sick people quickly rises. For Covid-19 we know this: about two out of every 10 people will need to be hospitalised for between two and six weeks. About one in 20 people will end up in intensive care, and one in a hundred will need a ventilator to help them breathe.

But we only have so many hospital and intensive care beds and ventilators. And they aren’t just sitting around waiting for an outbreak. Lots of them are already being used to care for people with things other than Covid-19. In New Zealand, we are just about to head into winter, the busiest season of the year for hospitals. If Covid-19 took hold here, our medical staff could find themselves in the awful position of having to decide who gets a bed or a ventilator. If you don’t think this could happen read 

 comes in. It means pulling out all the stops to try to slow the spread of the disease. If we can spread the number of people who contract the disease over a longer period of time, then we’ll have enough beds and ventilators for everyone who needs them.

Here’s how we expressed that earlier in the week:

 and his colleagues that was recently published in the 

. Sir Anderson is a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Imperial College London and chief scientist at the UK’s Ministry of Defence.

We have now augmented it further, but before we get to that I want to explain why.

 is that some people may be able to shed the Covid-19 virus for up to three days before they have symptoms. This is obviously a worrying development as it does mean that people may be more infectious in the early stages of Covid-19 than we initially thought. But it’s also important to mention that many of the people in these studies were living in the same household. That fits with all the data showing that most people need to be in repeated close contact with someone who has the virus to pick it up.

Right now we need every household to sign up to the 

 which is helping to act as an early warning system for Covid-19. We need everyone to get into the habit of washing their hands properly and regularly, and to avoid touching their mouth, nose, and eyes. It’s really hard, I know! Out, too, are hugs, kisses, and hongi.

We need to stay away from other people if we are sick. That means, if we are at all unwell, no going to church, the gym, the theatre, cinema, or to gigs and festivals.

Most importantly, we need to be calling ahead if we feel ill and want to go to the doctor or hospital. Something that will not #FlattenTheCurve is having a whole bunch of healthcare workers in isolation because they’ve been exposed to Covid-19. In fact, that does the opposite: it reduces our capacity to care for people who are sick.

If all these measures aren’t able to slow things down enough, then we’ll need to take more drastic action. That could be anything from as many people as possible working from home, and stopping all large gatherings, to a full-on lockdown like China and Italy have had to resort to.

At the time of writing, all the cases of Covid-19 we’ve had here in Aotearoa New Zealand are related to travel overseas. We don’t think we have transmission of the virus happening in our communities. But if it is, we are at the very early stage of the outbreak and that means we have an option other than to #FlattenTheCurve. And that is to #StopTheSpread.

Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea are examples of #StopTheSpread. They’ve all used slightly different strategies which we can learn from. But they acted quickly, with no half measures. We need to be prepared to do the same at the first sign of community transmission. That may be in the next few days, or it might not happen for a few weeks. So, this weekend, touch base with your whānau and friends and get your 

The important thing for any country that is able to #StopTheSpread is to not become complacent or if stop doing what needs to be done “perhaps to mitigate economic impact” as Sir Anderson and colleagues put it. Until a vaccine is ready, and that could take one to two years, we are all susceptible to this virus. If we turn our back for a minute, we’ll be back on the path to a serious outbreak.

As more and more countries see community transmission, to keep the virus out New Zealand will need travel restrictions on a scale we’ve never experienced before. Whether these are outright bans or 14 days in isolation is a decision for the government to make.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Prepare, don’t panic. Look after the vulnerable people in your community. We’re all in this together. And we are in it for the long haul.

Read Dr Siouxsie Wiles’ other explainers on the Covid-19 outbreak 

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We must act quickly, with no half-measures. Dr Siouxsie Wiles explains why, with a new animation from Toby Morris.