Patrick Gower’s On Lockdown: Moving Covid-19 doco ignores the anguish of financial failures

ADVANCE: It’s hard to believe, but it’s been less than six months since Covid-19 was declared a pandemic.

A great deal has happened in that time, so much has changed, so fast, that it can be difficult to look back to track exactly what events and decisions led to the unequivocally altered lives we now live.

In his new documentary special, Patrick Gower: on lockdown, filmed largely while New Zealand was at level 4, Newshub’s national correspondent traces the trajectory of Covid-19 in New Zealand and our response.

The documentary breaks new ground by interviewing people who contracted the virus or participated in some of our larger groups, which is well done and interesting.

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But Gower isn’t interested in examining the government’s response, to the point where the special completely overlooks the financial impact of Covid-19 in New Zealand – an omission so impressive it’s almost dishonest.

Gower struggles to compare New Zealand’s statistics with those of other countries, particularly the US, which took a gentler approach to managing Covid-19 – they have more cases, more deaths, not fewer economic disruptions.

Gower spends a lot of time with Chief Health Officer Ashley Bloomfield, and also features interviews with Prime Minister and infectious disease specialist Professor Michael Baker, an epidemiologist who was one of the first to call for New Zealand to be blocked.

That means that much of the information from politicians and experts is something that we have heard before, and the documentary accepts without question the decisions they have made on our behalf. And Gower makes the movie fit that narrative.

He speaks to a Queenstown tour operator who acknowledges a 100 percent business collapse but tells us nothing about what that means to him personally.

Interestingly, Gower also chose to interview the New Zealand owners of the multi-million dollar toy company Zuru, billionaires who are based in China and praise the New Zealand approach, rather than one of the many small business owners whose livelihoods are have been seriously affected.

Gower tells us that 35,000 New Zealanders lost their jobs and demand for food packages increased during the shutdown; But then he goes directly to an interview with Finance Minister Grant Robertson to tell us about everything the government has done to mitigate the economic impact.

Gower certainly didn’t need to challenge the government’s Covid-19 response strategy. There is nothing wrong with a journalist examining the situation and concluding that the nation’s leadership did the right thing.

But almost completely ignoring one of the most significant impacts of the virus is false.

However, when Quarantined explores the personal side of Covid-19, it is at its most fascinating.

Gower was granted an interview with Betty and Manoli, the couple whose wedding in Bluff on March 21 was the source for one of New Zealand’s largest Covid groups. One of her guests, a flight attendant, was identified as the one who brought the virus to the country. Both the bride and groom contracted the coronavirus and two people died, including Manoli’s father.

His story is sad and sensitively handled, and amid all the numbers and science, he puts a human face on New Zealand’s Covid-19 story.

There are other examples of this as well, in the Invercargill nurse breaking down while talking about the early days of the virus, the cyclist who got infected in Bluff while completing a trip from Auckland, the Auckland airport worker and his wife, who injured in an induced coma, near death, as a result of the coronavirus, and others.

Gower himself cries when Manoli talks about her father’s death.

This pathos is the kind of thing we’ve seen Gower excel at before, in specials like In marijuana and recent special research on the impact of methamphetamine addiction on families. He’s very good at that, and like those examples Quarantined puts an emotional spin on the science and statistics that dominate reporting on the subject.

There is also something chilling about looking back at the early days of the virus with the knowledge we now have. Written big, the speed with which it took hold both in New Zealand and around the world is impressive.

It is disappointing that Quarantined it does not cover the whole picture of the impact of the virus in New Zealand. Gower certainly could have given up some of the opinions we’ve all heard before in favor of exploring some more of the negative consequences.

But where the documentary is deep, it gets it right. It is worth seeing, although it may be incomplete.