COVID-19 in Aotearoa
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Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in Aotearoa, 556 days ago, the country has spent around 3 months in higher-levels of lockdown. Over a year of the pandemic experience in this country has not been that of late-2019, or even early 2020. The pandemic has changed how we work. Mask wearing in public, scanning in the QR codes using the Tracer App, being prepared at a few hours notice to stay at home for as long as it takes to break the chain of transmission, flatten the curve, stamp out the virus.
From the original March 2020 lockdown, I have been in 2 further short lockdowns of two weeks — in August 2020 and February 2021 — both of which have resulted in the removal of COVID-19 from community transmission. I write this, currently in my fourth week of a lockdown caused by the transmission of the Delta Variant. We had 20 cases today, we had 20 cases yesterday. That’s down from a peak last weekend of 86 cases.
Because of this successful strategy, which has worked as it is intended to up until now (and has every indication of working again, for Delta), it’s almost impossible to compare Aotearoa with fellow former colony Australia, or its former colonial master, Britain. Not that it hasn’t stopped people, here and in those countries, from expressing their disapproval of Aotearoa’s success in preventing the virus from spreading.
We are a ‘socialist hermit kingdom’, we are trapped in purgatory, equivalences have been drawn with the Berlin Wall and Oliver Cromwell (??). There have been repeated claims that Jacinda Ardern is running a brutal dictatorship, crushing individual freedoms and destroying liberal democracy. (She isn’t, she’s moderate centrist.)
Each time a representative of a right-wing think-tank, or media commentator from overseas, or domestically makes the daring argument that Aotearoa will have to abandon its approach eventually, ridicules our public for going along with the successful life-saving strategy — the public of Aotearoa responds, almost unanimously, by telling them yeah, nah, fuck off.
The highest number of deaths from COVID-19 in Aotearoa on a single day is 4. Our total number of COVID-19 deaths is 26, with one being added to that number in the current outbreak in Auckland this week. The current Delta outbreak, a far more contagious and dangerous version of COVID-19, has peaked at 86 cases — three short of the peak in our initial outbreak of 2020.
Ah, but you can’t stay like that forever, finger wag the critics. And they’re right. But the situation here is not like the situation there. With the Delta outbreak, we have rapidly increased our vaccination programme, which was underway before but not at the same scale as Britain’s or even Australia’s. If you were deeply cynical and seeking to score points on Aotearoa not being like those countries, you’d point to that as a failure. But why did Britain have to expedite vaccine’s approval, why is Australia scrambling to vaccinate their population? Because, quite simply, their governments failed to protect their people.
On April 21 last year, 1,224 people in Britain died from COVID-19. They didn’t have the testing capacity, which means that on the same day 4,760 people tested positive for COVID-19. If you look back through the data, say a month for those who died a month later of the virus, 1,197 tested positive on March 21. Fewer people tested positive than died a month later. Effectively Britain lost control of COVID-19 so early on, they had no way of tracking the virus effectively and thousands died as a result. Their lockdown did reduce the damage the virus was doing, getting case numbers down into the hundreds.
And then they unlocked, the Government subsidised people to go back to restaurants, kids went back to school. And all hell broke loose again. A month after schools went back and with some restrictions in places, cases and death numbers spiked. This time there was better testing capacity, and it showed that between October 3 2020 and February 28 2021 there were never less than 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day. There was another four week lockdown to ‘save Christmas’ in early November, which reduced the positive case numbers to the mid-teen thousands before heading upwards once more
Fortunately there was the vaccine. The British Government realised it could not prevent the viral spread, or the deaths that were locked in as a result of case numbers in the 30,000+ per day. So it began a mass vaccination programme, even as the results of a brief Christmas rules relaxation began to see daily death tolls in the thousands in January and February 2021. The total dead in Britain is 155,000. Each day brings another hundred-odd deaths even now, as the mostly vaccinated population continues to test positive for the virus in numbers averaging in the 20 and 30 thousand.
In Australia, there is an intermediary between Aotearoa and Britain. Equally, they went hard and early against the virus with lockdowns and testing. Their viral peak, in their second outbreak in August 2020 (about the same time that Aotearoa had a short lockdown) was just 715 cases. Their highest death toll was 59 on a single day. The strategy worked, the numbers of daily positive tests were restricted to quarantine cases — their August outbreak was the result of a quarantine breach.
There was some unseemly inter-state and party politicking around the August outbreak, as the State of Victoria’s Labor Premier Dan Andrews advocated a lockdown— for which he was ruthlessly attacked in the Murdoch media, and by the national governing Liberal National Party. But it worked, they got back to their noted ‘double doughnut days’ (0 new cases 0 new deaths in the community). And like Aotearoa, they were hanging on in there for vaccines to come online. From late October 2020 to June 2021, just 5 people died of COVID-19 in Australia.
Then it all got fucked up. Their vaccination programme began in March and by late June 2021 they had 6.8% of their population fully vaccinated, and just under 24% with one jab. Then COVID-19 hit the state of New South Wales and the Liberal National Party Premier Gladys Berejiklian, aware of the criticism of her Labor counterpart in Victoria, made a show of not locking down everywhere immediately to keep businesses open. Instead, local lockdowns were introduced to specific areas. However people continued to travel in and out of those areas, for work and other reasons, and the virus spread.
Berejiklian expanded the lockdown area coverage, but the viral spread merely extended further out from Sydney. When the wider regional lockdown was introduced, the virus was already out there in homes. New South Wales has been running at over 1,000 cases of COVID-19 a day for the 11 days to September 5th 2021, with reports that hospitals in the Sydney area are unable to deal with the number of patients requiring care and a rising death toll.
As COVID-19 spreads, it mutates. The more opportunities the virus has to spread, the more it mutates. The variants of the original COVID-19 often come from countries with a mass spread of the virus. The Alpha Variant was formed in Britain in October 2020, Beta stemmed from South Africa in December 2020, Gamma came from Brazil in January 2021, Delta originated in India in October 2020 but soon spread to Britain, and via Britain to Australia and worldwide. It also can kill those who are fully vaccinated, although obviously vaccination does improve your chances when compared to not being vaccinated.
The State of Victoria has an outbreak of Delta because the State of New South Wales has an outbreak of Delta. Aotearoa has an outbreak of Delta because New South Wales has an outbreak of Delta. New South Wales has an outbreak of Delta because India and Britain have an outbreak of Delta.
Britain failed to deal with COVID-19 in 2020, New South Wales failed to deal with COVID-19 in 2021. Both have taken the same approach to the inability to prevent the spread of the virus, due to failed public health and political leadership responses.
Firstly, minimise the deaths, Berejiklian pointing out that deaths are sad but 8,000,000 people in lockdown is no way to live this week, omitting that unlocking while cases continue to spike is equally no way to live when you die of COVID-19.
Secondly, go all-in on vaccination. Britain’s swift approval and mass vaccination programme has reduced what would have been thousands upon thousands of more deaths, to merely hundreds every day. That’s still grim as fuck, but it’s literally all they can do now.
This acceptance of mass death as an inevitability underpins a lot of the criticism of Aotearoa from Britain and Australia. We’re shirking our deaths by refusing to let COVID-19 into the country, by locking down and managing quarantine at borders. We’re simply not doing our part. And it’s absolute fucking bullshit.
Here in Aotearoa, we know we can’t maintain the current border controls and lockdowns forever. We knew that when we locked down last year. Back then the entire country had just over 100 ICU beds. Modelling of an outbreak without a lockdown would have seen our health system collapse within weeks as deaths spiked into the hundreds, and even thousands. For a nation of just 5,000,000 people, that would have been even more chaotic than Britain in European winter 2020 or the current scenes in New South Wales.
That our lockdown worked was due, not just to the excellent public health response and political communication and leadership, but also an overwhelming majority of the public establishing almost instant and concrete solidarity around breaking the chains of transmission, flattening the curve, stamping out the virus.
In part, this is because we know who will be most affected by COVID-19. Aotearoa has the largest Pasifika population in the world, Māori make up about 17% of the population, Pasifika just over 8%. They earn less, live shorter lives (it’s a result of colonialism and structural racism, obviously) and often are those working to keep large cities like Auckland operating. COVID-19 may affect the Pākeha (white NZ) population, but it would devastate Māori and Pasifika.
We know this because Aotearoa already fucked up an epidemic in 2019. There was a measles outbreak in South Auckland, due to vaccine hesitancy and the Ministry of Health’s failure to deal with that hesitancy. It spread through the community fast, and killed 2 people. But it also spread to Tonga, which had 600 cases, and Samoa. Samoa has a population of 197,000. 5,707 people caught the measles. 83 died. Of the first 70 deaths, 61 of them were under 4 years old. That was on Aotearoa, we fucked up our public health response to an infectious disease and vaccination, and loads of children died as a result.
Aotearoa’s plan has never been to remain in splendid isolation forever, and we have all watched on horror-stricken at the effects COVID-19 has had on other countries. By locking down last year we took a chance on elimination of COVID-19. Once we were successful, which took a lot of effort from everyone and some luck along the way, the plan was then to keep out the virus for as long as possible, or until a vaccine was available.
Unlike Britain we did not rush to try and get to the front of the vaccine queue, because while it was experiencing the huge European winter spike in cases, Aotearoa had zero cases of COVID-19 in the community. We placed our orders, but recognised that other nations had an immediate and more pressing need for vaccination to prevent even further horrors being heaped upon them.
Aotearoa has also ensured that nations within the old ‘New Zealand Realm’ of the Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau have all received vaccine doses — with those three nations all reporting 97% and 96% in the first two. Samoa also locked itself down early, and has reported just 3 cases and 0 deaths from the start of the pandemic, helped in part by Aotearoa’s border controls restricting the usual 21 flights per day between the two island nations.
Ironically, our plan has been to copy Australia and Britain, just without the thousands or hundred thousand deaths. Aotearoa is going to vaccinate as many people as possible, and then begin to open up to nations who are not still gripped as tightly by COVID-19 and its variants. The plan for this was produced, and made public, in early August just prior to the current Delta outbreak.
There will be 14 day self-isolation at home, rather than the current Managed Isolation Quarantine hotels, there may be future lockdowns but with a vaccinated population in the high 80’s and early 90 percents, we will hopefully not see the same level of mortality if it does get loose. We will have done everything we can before that happens.
The presence of Delta has seen our vaccination programme accelerate rapidly, in that we are currently delivering a dose of the vaccine to around 1% of the population every single day. That we are doing this while reducing COVID-19 case numbers is a testament to the hard work of our public health system, heroes every single one of them. We have never stood on our doorsteps clapping them.
We have done things differently here from the very beginning of the pandemic, based on the unique features of Aotearoa as a relatively small population with an equivalent public health system, a nation that had recent experience of failing to control an epidemic, and one which is a gateway nation to many of our Pacific neighbours.
That it has worked is, as I have said, a credit to the hard work of our public health system, the communication and leadership of our politicians, and the near-unanimous public backing of this approach. This is demonstrated nowhere better than the election that took place last year, where the public handed Jacinda Ardern’s Labour a majority using a proportional voting system. There has also been an element of good fortune, and there have been several occasions where things could have taken a turn for the worse.
Don’t think we don’t recognise our outlying position as one relatively unscathed by the global pandemic. We do. We’re not a hermit kingdom, we’re not in purgatory, we’re not subjects of a brutal dictatorship crushing our freedoms. We are waiting for the point where we can most safely open back up our country and welcome in our friends, families, and strangers from overseas, without mass death as a result.
That time is coming, it was always coming. We look forward to seeing you.
