Morning roundup

 Ok. It's down to one Chrome sheet. The worthies!

• Wokeness as Saddam statues. Great story on how Saddam Hussein might not have even wanted all those statues of him, but lower-level officials would ramp themselves up in demonstrating allegiance. The mechanism does go back a distance; Mark Twain described a similar one back in Connecticut Yankee.
• Months ago, we'd called for just giving residence to everyone who's been here since the March 2020 lockdown. The government's alternative misses a few who should have received residence, including people who had to flip to short-term visas while here. 
• The Government's big emission plan is more than a little disappointing. Remember how Rod Carr said it wasn't his job to think about whether any of his measures passed any kind of cost-benefit, because that was the next guy's job? Well, James Shaw doesn't think it's his job either. No cost-per-tonne on any of their proposals anywhere to be found. And we know that the US version of what he's proposed, Cash for Clunkers, cost hundreds of dollars per tonne. Some of the other measures are detailed here. Me and Matt had a chat about it yesterday. 
• If you hadn't caught it last week, the Government got told they were too slow on saliva-based testing. Indeed. My column from last December. Oh, and they also didn't bother scaling up contact tracing, presumably because they were super-confident in their super-risky way of running MIQ. And at yesterday's 1PM standup, Director-General of Health Bloomfield could not answer a fairly simple question from a journalist: how many ICU beds do we even have? He could only point to the percentage of open spaces. Of course we know the problem with that. If you have 3 beds and 33% are empty, they'll all be full soon. If you have 3000 beds and 33% are empty, we have almost certainly invested too much in increasing capacity. But do we have 260 staffed beds? 280? 320? 340? It's somewhere in there right? 
• A New England Journal of Medicine piece from last November making the obvious point: one rapid antigen test might not be all that accurate, but taking them every day is more accurate. The government last week announced that they'll start being allowed in more trials. Bit of a shame that we didn't have them for daily use at workplaces in Auckland running at L3/4, between PCR tests. Meanwhile, Auckland case numbers keep rising. 
• I'm quoted in this piece on how the Government hasn't been bothering to prioritise getting medical staff into NZ through the MIQ system. 
• My column in the Herald, last week, on Covid response, summarizing my report on it, which also came out last week. 
• Oops