| New Zealander here. My wife and I just made it through the MIQ system in time to see our families for Christmas (and introduce our son to his grandparents for the first time). A few interesting things: - we had to enter the MIQ lottery five times before ‘winning’ a spot. The lottery system is the same used by some shoe drops and ticket reservations, and there is no weighting given to citizens that have enrolled in previous lotteries. - when you make it through the lottery and select a date, it has to match the date you arrive in NZ exactly. If flights only go to NZ on certain dates, and those dates are all taken, then you’re out of luck. Many people make it through the lottery only to find that there are no dates left that work. - you are not told what MIQ hotel room or city you will be in until you arrive in NZ. At that point you may be flown across the country (adding and extra 5+ hours to the end of an international trip), and placed in who-knows-what hotel. You are charged a set fee for the hotel. - at every stage of your stay at MIQ, the people running the show have the ability to prolong your stay if they believe there is any COVID risk. The morning we were packing our bags to leave, the hotel called to say we needed to stay in our room while they waited on an urgent COVID test for a suspected positive case. Had the result actually been positive, most of the hotel (everyone from our flight) would have needed to stay additional days. - ‘famous’ people go through MIQ too. We met someone on the flight that plays the lead role in a popular TV series. Like everyone else, they were flown across the country and placed in a hotel room. - the hotel food is usually not great. We were fortunate enough to be in an Uber Eats delivery area, so we ordered out a few times. In regards to the linked article: the real problem, at least to me, is that New Zealand citizens with an urgent need to come home (visa, sick relative, funeral, etc) are not always able to do so. MIQ is an interesting experience, and at least at the start of COVID it made it possible for NZ preserve a pre-pandemic way of life. Now that we’re years into COVID and vaccines are readily available, it’s extremely frustrating for New Zealanders with family or loved ones overseas. Public opinion is steadily shifting towards ‘open up the country’, and the government has announced some tentative dates for doing this (although they were recently shifted back due to omicron). |
As someone who was in a Covid-free region of Australia all throughout the pandemic, I’ve seen first-hand what happens when borders are reopened. Local businesses are far less harmed from closed borders than they are from people avoiding clustering in indoor areas — either out of an abundance of caution for their health, or to avoid becoming a “close contact” of a Covid-19 case and then being forced into quarantine. Once borders reopen, associated mask mandates give everyone needless anxiety, while the hospital system beginning to buckle becomes a constant source of fear.
Closed borders allowed Australia and New Zealand to perform better economically than more permissive countries, and allowed their residents to live life like it was still 2019.
Permissive countries like America merely pretended to allow life to go on like it was 2019, while their conservative media exported tone deaf rationalizations for permissiveness to AU & NZ residents who were on average far better off than they were. The American media’s attempts at guilting antipodeans for closing themselves off to the world were laughed off as completely bizarre — most people were all too happy to allow the rest of the world to think they were doing it tough living their happy, blissful, Covid-free lives behind impenetrable borders.
AU & NZ would probably have at least another year of normal life left to live if their governments had directed international arrivals to quarantine in dedicated facilities in remote locations rather than in retrofitted hotels smack dab in the center of major urban areas.