Shaun Hendy, Bridget Williams Books, $39.99
Shaun Hendy specialises in complexity: understanding it, modelling what might emerge from it, and translating all that for the layperson. During the acute onset of COVID, he and the University of Auckland-hosted research institute he founded, Te Pūnaha Matatini, were called on to model scenarios for the government. He quickly became a go-to for the media. Now, after a few years of relatively clear air, he has written a meticulous, pacy, scientific memoir.
Hendy’s book is packed with facts, figures and clear-headed arguments. As well, he resurrects the urgency of those early days and offers a fascinating glimpse into how the plane was built while it was already flying—the sheer stress and flurry of it all.
The media called on Hendy for comment so often that he racked up about 1000 interviews in a year, his street becoming a parade of cameras and reporters. He describes frequent 12-hour-plus days; some of his descriptions of the modelling work he and the team needed to produce have a Mission: Impossible feel to them, with months of work squashed into a few days as red seconds tick down.
How will history judge New Zealand’s COVID-19 response? The metrics seem clear enough: in the OECD, Aotearoa had the lowest rates of excess deaths with the third-lightest restrictions during 2020 to 2022. Last year a report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry largely endorsed New Zealand’s response.
But more fickle are the memories, hearts, and minds of New Zealanders. Hendy and his team received death threats, which were heavily gendered (Dr Siouxsie Wiles suffering the worst of it); his name and those of many other commentators were circulated on a “Nuremberg 2.0” list at the Parliament protests, with calls for their hanging.
I recently interviewed Hendy for a book launch event in Nelson and found it almost quaint to remember the days of supermarket queuing, Sir Ashley Bloomfield memes, the daily waits for the death tolls, and our months of COVID freedom while the world burned—before Delta, the vaccine mandates, and the Parliament protests splintered our “team of five million”.
I came away thinking that the saddest lesson of COVID is that some of us assign so little value to the lives of others, particularly the elderly and chronically ill.
Three days after the book launch, RNZ reported the beginning of another COVID wave.
