Ardern opted for the second path. When New Zealand reported only 28 cases, Ardern closed borders to foreigners, and when there were 102 cases, it announced a nationwide lockdown.
In fact, Ardern offered New Zealanders a deal: deal with some of the toughest rules in the world, and in return, be kept safe – first from the deadly coronavirus, and later, from potential economic destruction.
Then, last week, that changed.
The country reported its first cases of community transmission in three months, leaving the most populous city, Auckland, the country back under lockdown. The national election was postponed for one of the few times in the history of the country.
Somehow, authorities said, it turned out that the virus had crept across the border. As of Thursday, New Zealand has 101 active cases, bringing the total reported cases of coronavirus to 1,304, including 22 deaths.
This alarmed New Zealand opposition parties, who questioned whether the government had failed to end its trade. “The government has one task: to keep the virus out of our community so that we can prevent lockdowns. It has failed and we are all paying the price,” said David Seymour, leader of the right-wing minority party ACT.
Around Asia-Pacific, other countries that have similar implicit deals with their citizens are facing similar situations. Australia, for example, also took swift, drastic action at the start of the pandemic – but border problems led to an outbreak in Victoria, prompting the country’s second largest city, Melbourne, to return. go to a lockdown and be placed under a curfew.
Now that people in Europe are going on holiday, people are staying in parts of New Zealand and Australia – two countries that were once held as examples of how the virus should be under lock and key. For some, that begs the question: did they take the right approach? And by promising security, were governments like Ardern always set on failing?
Unforgettable outbreak?
From the beginning, Ardern was clear – she did not just want to limit the impact of coronavirus, she wanted to eliminate it.
Elimination – which the New Zealand health authorities define 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 right 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 specimens of community transmission, but even before the country announced its fresh cases, health authorities and experts warned that another outbreak was unnecessary.
Shortly before New Zealand marked 100 days without a single transmission of coronavirus, advised Director-General of Health, Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, giving people up to face masks.
“I do not think it’s weird to ask people to prepare for possible natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis and so on – it’s actually appealing to people,” he said in a Facebook Live Q&A session. “This is about preparing.”
For some people, that didn’t really make sense. Only New Zealanders can enter the country, and even then they will have to spend 14 days in a state-run quarantine facility and be tested twice for coronavirus. If the borders were safe, then why would a new outbreak then be inevitable?
The problem in this case is that the borders were not so secure. Authorities have admitted that workers at New Zealand’s border guards – people who would be most vulnerable to the virus – were not checked 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 lived up to the very clear expectations of Minister, the decisions that the cabinet has made have not been implemented in a timely or robust manner, and that is disappointing and frustrating.”
But even if the authorities had not made any mistakes, it is possible to imagine a scenario where an infected person could slip through the cracks. We know that false negative tests happen, so there is a very small chance that a person Covid-19 can be positive and still be infected if left in the community after 14 days.
As top scientist Peter Gluckman, former Prime Minister Helen Clark and former Air New Zealand chief executive Rob Fyfe wrote in a paper in July: “As smugglers have known for centuries, border controls are never idiot-proof.”
What the outbreak means for Ardern
It’s never a good time for a coronavirus recurrence, but the timing of this latest outbreak is particularly bad for Ardern.
In April, when New Zealand was under its strict lockdown, a survey revealed that 88% of New Zealanders trust the response to the pandemic, state broadcaster TVNZ reported. In the months since, Ardern’s party has grown in popularity to well over 50%.
But now, with the election just eight weeks away, Ardern’s opponents have grasped the problems at the border.
On Thursday, Judith Collins, the leader of the main right-wing opposition National Party, launched her own proposed border policy, saying the government’s “shock and trusted response” had endangered the health and livelihoods of 5 million New Zealanders. .
Others questioned whether New Zealand’s focus on elimination was in fact the right approach.
“Our attempt to eliminate Covid is an obsession that will destroy us,” wrote columnist Damien Grant on the country’s largest news website, Stuff.co.nz. He reiterated feelings that rattled New Zealand for a while – in their paper in July, Gluckman, Clark and Fyfe asked the question of whether New Zealand could afford to wait another year or two “in almost total physical isolation.”
“We were told we were going hard and early and we stayed longer in lockdown for the first time, those extra hard weeks because we want a yo-yo back in lockdown, and here we are again,” Paul Goldsmith, of the National Party, said Tuesday.
As Goldsmith noted, there is not just a health risk in returning to the virus – there is an economic risk of a return to lockdown.
Auckland accounts for about 40% of New Zealand’s economy, and the country is once again raising half a billion New Zealand dollars ($ 327 million) to support workers in the city’s current lockdown. Lockdowns also come with other costs – like other countries, New Zealand saw an increase in reports of domestic violence during its first national lockdown, national broadcaster Radio New Zealand reported.
Ardern and her party will try to play down the benefits that come from their strict handling, even if it was not perfect.
The Prime Minister has consistently said that the best economic strategy is to win the battle against Covid-19. Finally, the cost of letting the virus spiral out of control. An out-of-control outbreak would have economic consequences everywhere, and on top of that there are health resources, the cost of a slow recovery of coronavirus, and death.
So far, statistics show that New Zealand’s tough approach does not have devastating economic costs. Earlier this month, the government reported only 4% unemployment, although the underutilization rate grew from 10.4% to 12%, the largest quarterly rise since 2004.
“What we find internationally is that countries that have control over Covid-19, such as China, even if they experience occasional outbreaks, have stronger economies,” Dominp Stephens, chief economist at Westpac NZ, said in a video statement last Friday. “Those countries that have lost control of the virus like the United States are constantly seeing economic forecasts go down and are economically weaker.”
While Ardern’s critics are getting louder, there is still goodwill for the Prime Minister and her government – it was not so long ago that New Zealand was the envy of the world. And New Zealand authorities have acted swiftly – a day after the new cases were announced last week, Auckland went into lockdown, and more than 100,000 tests were processed within five days.
But the real test of Ardern is yet to come. If the country goes to the polls in October, it will hope that, despite the hiccups, the country still thinks its tough coronavirus approach was worth it.
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