Covid 19 coronavirus: Jack Tame – My experience in managed isolation

OPINION:

A person on my plane tested positive for Covid-19.

We found out shortly after. On day three the test results came in and everyone in our managed isolation facility received a phone call telling them to stay in their rooms until further notice.

Rides are not allowed in the parking lot. There are no trips to the nurse. The poor thing that tested positive was picked up and taken to JetPark in Auckland. The staff called us a couple of hours later and said we were fine to resume our normal hours.

I can’t say how typical my experience with MIQ was. People in different facilities in different cities have different experiences.

I was at The Distinction Hotel in Hamilton, and my experience over the two weeks was that the system in those facilities was extremely well organized. Despite the fact that when I was there they were all from the same flight … the hotel divided us into different groups, as happens when people from different flights have to be separated.

Every day our dinner bag had a small piece of paper with the next day’s schedule. She would tell you what time your group could go for a walk and what time to see the nurse to have your temperature taken. The idea was that the groups did not cross each other. Despite living with them for two weeks, I would not recognize the vast majority of the people who flew home with me from America.

A couple of days after my arrival, I felt a little phlegm. This is not the kind of thing you would normally be weighed down with, except that it was interesting to go through the experience in an isolation facility. Basically, it was the kind of illness I’d normally expect after a month of crazy work, two elections, no sleep, and world travel.

However, I told the nurses and they immediately isolated me. For two or three days, I was not allowed to leave my room for nothing. A nurse was approaching, with her complete personal protective equipment, accompanied by a soldier, to take my temperature and control me. Despite a negative test result on the third day, I was not allowed to wash or leave my room until my symptoms were gone and the medical staff was satisfied.

How did I pass the time? Was it intolerably boring? This is the first question everyone asks. For me, the answer is no. I had a little work to do, but in two weeks. Actually, I didn’t finish half of the things that I had been planning.

I didn’t finish half of my reading or watch half of my shows. And I was never bored. Part of that was that MIQ kept us pretty busy. Each of our groups was assigned two one-hour walks in the parking lot each day. Also, you could go out for a run in the morning, and every day at a different time you had to go visit the nurse to have your temperature taken.

So with three meals, on a typical day, my schedule might look like this:

6.30 am: wake up. 7am: Running in the parking lot. 8am: Breakfast in my room. 10am: One hour walk in the parking lot. 12.30 pm: Lunch in my room. 2pm: Visit the nurses. 4pm: One hour walk in the parking lot. 6:00 pm: dinner. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

The space to walk was definitely a big plus of our hotel. I think there were people on our flight who probably came out of isolation in better shape than when they arrived. I didn’t, because I was eating everything.

The food was plentiful, hot, rich, and tasty. People in my group ordered at Domino’s pizza and KFC. The first week I received a Countdown delivery with chocolate and candy. The second week I felt a little guilty, and instead got some fancy yogurt and fresh blueberries.

Again, I can only speak from my experience at MIQ. My aunt is isolated in an elegant hotel in central Auckland. It has no windows that can be opened and has to take a bus to go for a walk every other day. That would be tough. But here are my general observations:

When an MIQ installation is well organized like mine, there are not many cracks in the armor. Yes, there will always be little glitches, but at no point in my two weeks in Hamilton did I see any bugs or bugs that I thought could spread the virus.

Hopefully, by now, most MIQ installations will have their processes down. That said, it is a blunt tool. One of the nurses told me that she was surprised that we only had one positive case on our flight from the United States, given how many cases they had there.

So should we treat people in Australia or the Pacific Islands without Covid the same way we treat people in a place with 150,000 cases a day?

I do not think so. I think we should consider a more nuanced system for the people arriving, depending on where they come from. It is absolutely logical for Pakistani cricketers or others arriving from hotspots to go through the full two-week MIQ.

I also think that the vast majority of people who go through MIQ should be grateful. I know there have been stories on the news with people complaining about food and this and that. In my experience, we were treated with generosity and sensitivity. None of us wanted to be there, but they all got down to business and it was honestly okay. Time passed much faster than I expected.

Once the test results from the 12th came back, we only had one more night. We got up early, each group visited the nurse and they allowed us to sit in the huge atrium of the hotel and remove our masks for breakfast. It was the first time he had seen most people’s faces.

The soldiers, nurses, hotel staff said goodbye. We were flight number 27 that they had had for isolation. On Thursday morning at 7.35am, exactly two weeks since our plane landed in Auckland, we boarded a bus and left the hotel. A representative from Tainui gave us one last goodbye: “Welcome to the Five Million team.”