Stuff Digital Edition

RECONNECTING THE

Plans to reconnect New Zealand to the world were launched with great fanfare days before a Delta outbreak that would change everything. Dileepa Fonseka looks at whether the strategy is still on track.

‘Ido understand why people look at that and think, ‘Gosh, what’s the logic here’?’’ Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins says. ‘‘There’s a logic to it. It does require a bit of working through.’’

Hipkins was replying to questions from a health select committee in November about keeping the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system in place for every incoming traveller, despite an outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland.

The logic of MIQ was easy enough to explain early in the pandemic but on the day Hipkins fronted up to that select committee, there were more cases of Covid-19 popping up in the community than in isolation facilities.

In total, there were 197 community cases of Covid-19 in Auckland that day. None came in via the international border.

MIQ and closed borders have been a key feature of New Zealand’s response. Cutting us off from the rest of the world initially looked like the best response to the pandemic, when it meant being free of Covid.

But as the virus spread around the country, more people have started to question how long that isolation could continue.

Morgo founder Jenny Morel says the decision to retain MIQ through the latter part of this year has been a costly one for businesses.

Northern hemisphere business conferences, an important part of the way that export businesses maintain relationships, run at the beginning and end of the year.

‘‘I think we’ve done a lot of damage to our reputation by becoming the hermit kingdom,’’ Morel says.

Northern hemisphere businesspeople were less tolerant of their New Zealand counterparts not turning up for important meetings, she says, while foreign investors were less understanding that they could not travel to New Zealand to see the businesses they were being asked to invest in.

‘‘There’s desperation to get moving again for two reasons: One, because you haven’t been moving for so long; and two, because the rest of the world is,’’ Morel says.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker questioned the logic behind retaining MIQ for fully vaccinated travellers, as community cases ticked up, especially with the need to use these facilities to isolate community cases who couldn’t safely isolate at home.

In August, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern outlined a ‘‘reconnecting New Zealand’’ strategy, under which the borders would be reopened in the first quarter of next year, using risk-based settings.

Baker applauded the plan when it was first announced but he thinks the case for a glacial reopening of borders has almost evaporated.

‘‘I think that timeline and process has changed radically. I thought the reconnecting strategy was pretty sound, and I was along contributing to the launch but everything’s changed because of the Delta variant outbreak.

‘‘And New Zealand has shifted to a suppression approach, which was not anticipated – we were going to be elimination until early next year.’’

The report, formulated by Sir David Skegg’s Strategic Covid-19 Public Health Advisory Group, imagines a future where the country spends months experimenting with different types of Covid-19 tests and home isolation pilots to see which might work best to safely allow vaccinated travellers to skip MIQ.

‘‘It’s all changed. I mean, basically now the risk equation is completely different,’’ Baker says.

‘‘Things like that pilot scheme [for home isolation], you know, the careful reconnecting to the outside world I think has now been made fairly redundant.’’

After Hipkins’ select committee appearance he doubles down on MIQ at a 1pm press conference: ‘‘We do have to look at the picture of cumulative risk when we make decisions about the international border, and doing things at exactly the same time as we do them domestically potentially adds a lot of additional risk to the system all at the same time. And so I think people should expect to see things stepped out carefully so that we can keep control of the situation rather than do things all at once, which means potentially we don’t.’’

Ardern jumps in a little bit later to say the plan is still going ahead.

A week later, the ‘‘cumulative risk’’ has evaporated, and the Government announces a plan to allow unvaccinated

New Zealanders in from Australia in January, all countries in February, with nonNZ citizens to follow in April.

The Reconnecting New Zealand plan imagined a world where vaccinated travellers would be triaged according to vaccination status and the country they came from.

It was set to start by the end of the first quarter of 2022, effectively before the end of March.

Low-risk arrivals would be given a rapid antigen test on arrival and go into home isolation if they tested negative, or MIQ if they tested positive.

Now, systems to allow for faster testing, home isolation, and freer borders are within reach but there are questions about whether the Government wants to use them. Thousands more tests will probably require better data systems, for a start. Stuff reported that testing systems were coming under strain when data had to be entered twice a week.

Rako Science chief science officer Stephen Grice says key elements to enable freer borders could be rolled out within three days. His company even pitched some of the systems that might be needed to the Ministry of Health.

Grice’s concept is an ‘‘e-gate’’ type system, the type of streamlined automated travel gates used for travellers from places such as Australia. His company has been trialling the elements of it for travellers leaving the country.

Rako Science is a major supplier of pre-departure PCR saliva tests to people departing from Auckland Airport. People who need a saliva test pre-register their details online and scan their passport at a kiosk at the airport. The kiosk labels a saliva collection container with a barcode linked to those details. A passenger then has to dribble into the container and hand it over for processing.

Grice’s idea is to adapt this type of system for incoming travellers and make it more automated so that an incoming passenger can swipe their passport and then take and drop off their sample without the need for human supervision.

This would remove some bottlenecks in bringing people through the airport in a world where more testing is required. That will be important because the number of people passing through the borders is expected to increase once quarantine requirements are loosened.

‘‘People, they’re tired when they get off the plane but honestly it’s a two- or three-minute task.’’

IGENZ clinical microbiologist Arthur Morris says the important thing is to test incoming travellers with a sensitive PCR test before they enter the community, not simply on arrival at the airport.

Rapid antigen tests are best at detecting Covid when people show symptoms and are infectious, so there is a case for testing people before they get on a plane but less so when they will most likely be going into home isolation regardless of their test result.

Morris argues rapid antigen tests could slow things down. Who will teach people how to use them at the airport? Where will hundreds of people wait while their test results come through (a process that can take up to half an hour)? And how will the process of entering or verifying these self-generated results take place?

he wonders if it is even necessary for people to have their test results before they leave the airport, especially as all travellers will have had pre-departure PCR tests and would not have been allowed to board the plane if they were showing symptoms.

The original Reconnecting New Zealand plan envisaged rapid antigen tests being used to determine whether people would isolate at home or at an MIQ facility but now even community

cases of Covid-19 are isolating at home.

So, if a traveller were to test positive for Covid-19 with a rapid antigen test, they would most likely be told to quarantine at home anyway.

‘‘They should go into isolation, or home isolation or whatever, and then get a negative test within 48 hours of arriving, a PCR test . . . Then you can go about your business,’’ Morris says.

‘‘I’m a fan of rapid antigen tests, I think they’ve got a place in the future for workplaces and other places, but I don’t see them as a sensible option for a rival test for travellers.’’

Rako Science and IGENZ aren’t the only ones with ideas about the kind of technologies needed at the border. Businessman Sir Ian Taylor has been trying out a bunch of them, and a Government-run self-isolation pilot is under way too.

Morel says opening up is necessary for export-oriented businesses, which often have staff spread across several countries.

It will be impractical for many of these companies to be run remotely for much longer. A lot of business travel that can be done over videoconference will stay virtual but people will need to travel for some business activities.

‘‘To become an international business these days – it’s a network thing. It’s not about ‘We make stuff here and we push it over the wharf to you there.’ We have another development team somewhere else, and we have customer care people, and you want to grow your business, you need culture, and you need to make those people feel they’re part of your company.’’

Then there is another thing on the wishlist: Skilled migrants. Once other issues within the border system, such as family reunification, are dealt with, she hopes there will be opportunities to bring in more skilled workers.

This last assumption is something Into NZ immigration adviser Katy Armstrong is having to correct almost daily.

‘‘My own vision of the border opening is that you’re going to have a very controlled immigration set of criteria no matter what.’’ Temporary work visas remain suspended until February – Armstrong thinks this suspension will be extended, and a replacement system of accredited temporary work visas won’t be operational until July.

There are also signs the Government is planning to make tightly controlled border exemptions a permanent feature of the immigration landscape.

Armstrong says Immigration New Zealand is hiring more border staff. These are immigration officers who make decisions on critical worker applications. She asks why it would do this if that system wasn’t going to continue.

‘‘If we get more open borders, they [the Government] might say ,‘OK, we’ll broaden out the types of critical workers that you can have.’ It’s not going to be back to preCovid. For the first half of next year, I certainly don’t see it [normal immigration returning] – if not even the second half.’’

Under the pre-Covid immigration system employers could freely hire workers from overseas on temporary work visas but since the borders were closed the Government has been allocating exemptions on an almost case-by-case basis to particular industries.

‘‘This is just my prediction but they’ll do what they’ve been doing already . . . It’ll be who lobbies [best] . . . We’ve had sheep shearers; we’ve had fruit pickers; we’ve had fishermen,’’ Armstrong says. ‘‘I just think there’ll be more of that.’’

Add to this the Government’s immigration reset and a Productivity Commission report that made a big deal about the ‘‘absorptive capacity’’ of infrastructure to handle new migrants, and it soon becomes clear to people like Armstrong that a border reopening does not mean what many businesspeople think it will mean, at least when it comes to migration.

Even if it did, Armstrong has been receiving mixed messages from potential migrants. Many are backing out of plans to move to New Zealand on account of how difficult it has been for people to move in and out of the country over the past year.

That means even if we do loosen our border settings, some migrants with other options might be less willing to move here, anyway. ‘‘This idea that people would be clamouring to get into New Zealand is not manifesting but there may be when we do finally seem a lot more open.’’

The Monitor

en-nz

2021-12-05T08:00:00.0000000Z

2021-12-05T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282845079301379

Stuff Limited