Covid-19: South Auckland marae leaders feel mounting pressure during lockdown
Tuesday, 2 March 2021
South Auckland marae leaders are feeling mounting pressure as they ramp up testing while also caring for those impacted by the latest alert level change.
With the current outbreak centred in south Auckland around the Papatoetoe High School community, and the vaccine still months away from being rolled out to the general populace, marae have been operating at ground-zero to aid relief efforts.
Papakura Marae chief executive Tony Kake – along with Manurewa Marae, Te Puea Memorial Marae, Ngā Whare Waatea Marae, Turuki Healthcare and the Manukau Urban Māori Authority – issued a statement about the pressure the groups were feeling.
“We are well past prioritising testing in south Auckland,” Papakura Marae chief executive Tony Kake said.
**READ MORE:
* Crowded House not allowed: What's cancelled, what's postponed because of the latest Covid lockdown
* Covid-19: Lockdown in virus-free Cook Islands due to NZ community cases
**
“Doing what we can to the best of our ability with the resources we have at hand is our reality, not priority.
“We are happy to help relieve the pressure at Covid testing sites so – nau mai, haere mai whānau.”
Several of those leaders were also encouraging priority testing to be elevated in Māori communities regardless of symptoms or contact, to create and maintain a sense of safety.
Manukau Urban Māori Authority chairman Bernie O’Donnell said the complexities the virus posed demonstrated the need to continue to get tested, and “more than once to achieve visibility on it”.
“One test doesn’t mean you’re okay,” O’Donnell said.
There are already 10 community testing sites throughout Auckland, with five of them dotted around south Auckland.
But the marae are also taking pop-up testing stations into the community with Manurewa Marae running one on Monday and Ngā Whare Waatea Marae promising to have one up by Friday.
Meanwhile, over the weekend Turuki Healthcare tested more than three times the number of people compared to the day before – just under 300 whānau were tested in a single lane set up.
Its chief executive Te Puea Winiata said Māori providers had the bandwidth to test whānau and later, vaccinate in a range of settings.
She said 18 of their nurses and admin staff had been trained to administer the Pfizer vaccinations to border staff and enter data into the new system.
On Monday it came to light that a family member of one of the latest Covid-19 cases visited another household in Auckland’s February cluster during the first alert level 3 earlier this month.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern revealed Case M had become infected after a member in their household visited the second home in the cluster (Cases D to H).
“No-one is accepting here that these breaches were okay, they were not,” she said in a press conference on Monday afternoon.
But Manukau ward councillor Fa’anana Efeso Collins said that while the breaches had occurred, the latest outbreak was also a failure on the part of officials in overestimating how well-informed people were about the need to self-isolate.
“I can see we’re slowly moving into the post-kindness phase, where instead of being a team of five million, we are hearing that people just need to be compliant,” Collins said.
“But the danger I see is that if we are forcing people to be compliant, then what does that look like when the vaccine roll-out happens and half the community refuse, because it’s being forced on them?
“So we’ve got to be careful how we communicate things.”