In mid-March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in Europe and the United States, New Zealand’s Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern presented her country with a choice. They could let coronavirus creep into the community and brace for an onslaught, as other countries around the world had done. Or they could “go hard” by closing the border — even if that initially hurt the island nation’s hugely tourism-dependant economy.
Then, last week, that changed. The country reported its first cases of community transmission in three months, forcing the country’s most populous city, Auckland, back under lockdown. The national election was postponed for one of the few times in the country’s history. Somehow, authorities said, the virus appeared to have crept in through the border. As of Thursday, New Zealand has 101 active cases, bringing the country’s total reported coronavirus cases to 1,304, including 22 deaths.
That prompted outrage from New Zealand’s opposition parties, who questioned whether the government failed to uphold their end of the bargain. “The Government has one job: keep the virus out of our community so we can avoid lockdowns. It has failed and we are all paying the price,” said David Seymour, the leader of right-wing minority party ACT.
Around Asia-Pacific, other countries that entered into similar implicit deals with their citizens are facing similar situations. Australia, for instance, also took swift, tough action at the start of the pandemic — but issues at the border lead to an outbreak in the state of Victoria, prompting the country’s second-biggest city, Melbourne, to return to a lockdown and be placed under a curfew.
Now, as those in Europe go on holiday, people in parts of New Zealand and Australia — two countries that were once held up as examples of how to handle the virus — remain under lockdown. To some, that begs the question: did they take the right approach? And by promising safety, were governments like Ardern’s always setting themselves up to fail?
Inevitable outbreak?
Right from the start, Ardern was clear — she didn’t want to simply limit the impact of coronavirus, she wanted to eliminate it. Elimination — which the New Zealand health authorities defined as stopping the chains of transmission in the country — was an ambitious goal, and one that few nations adopted. But Ardern and her government said it was the right one to protect the health of both the public and the economy — and by April, New Zealand announced that it had achieved its goal of eliminating the virus.
For months, New Zealand had no instances of community transmission, but even before the country announced its fresh cases, health authorities and experts were warning that another outbreak was inevitable.
Shortly before New Zealand marked 100 days without any coronavirus transmission, Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield advised people to stock up on face masks. “I don’t think it’s scaremongering asking ask people to prepare for potential natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis and so on – it’s actually looking after people,” he said on a Facebook Live Q&A session. “This is about being prepared.”
For some people, that didn’t really make sense. Only New Zealanders can come into the country, and even then, they must spend 14 days in a state-run quarantine facility and be tested twice for coronavirus. If the borders were secure, then why would a new outbreak be inevitable?
The problem in this case is that the borders weren’t that secure. Authorities have admitted that workers at New Zealand’s border facilities — people who would have been most vulnerable to catching the virus — weren’t being tested on a regular basis.
“I want to acknowledge, at the outset, that testing of staff working at our border has been too slow,” Health Minister Chris Hipkins said Tuesday. “It has not met the very clear expectations of Minister, the decisions that Cabinet has made were not implemented in a timely or a robust manner, and that is disappointing and frustrating.”
