New Zealand’s ZERO-COVID strategy crumbles
Toilet paper shortages. Compulsory masks. A nation enthralled by the movements of a single COVID-19 spreader.
Watching New Zealand’s current news cycle is like taking a step into the past. The country was plunged into a snap lockdown last Tuesday after a single virus case — the first in half a year — was detected in Auckland, the country’s biggest city.
The so-called “Auckland cluster” threatens to end a period of almost unbelievable control of the virus in the world’s southernmost country.
Since COVID-19 arrived in New Zealand in late March last year, there have been fewer than 3,000 cases, and just 26 deaths. By any measure, that is a huge success. For comparison, last Wednesday alone the U.K. added 33,646 cases and 111 deaths.
The country is now the last real holdout of the “zero COVID” strategy shared with its near neighbour Australia, which has seen its own efforts fall apart amid similarly low vaccination rates.
“We’re almost on the cusp here,” says Sir Peter Gluckman, director at Koi T?, a think-tank at the University of Auckland and the country’s former chief science adviser. “Can we get the genie back in the bottle, and then hold out for long enough to get the population adequately vaccinated, and then open the borders?”
Spirits appear to still be high. Where lockdown fatigue kicked in across many parts of the world, New Zealanders on social media still seem to see the novelty of empty business districts and quiet streets. On video app Tiktok, a post mocking foolhardy COVID-19 superspreaders has racked up over 100,000 “likes.”
But the economic reality for some businesses will still be tough, particularly if temporary lockdowns become a frequent occurrence. Of the country’s three major export sectors — agriculture, tourism and education — the latter two are still being battered as a result of tight border controls that include a mandatory quarantine period for arrivals.
Where other countries are trying to rein in spending, New Zealand is still packing fiscal firepower, a side product of decades of broadly prudent management that saw it running successive surpluses.
“We knew that there was going to be a rainy day when we were going to have to spend up large fiscally,” says Arthur Grimes, senior fellow at Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, a research institute based in Wellington. “We always thought it was going to be a foot and mouth disease outbreak, but it turned out to be a COVID outbreak.”
But the virus has had impacts elsewhere that could be harder to tackle. House prices, a long-standing problem in the country, have jumped by around a fifth on average in the past year. There are hopes that an interest rate rise could begin to take pressure off the sector, but the Reserve Bank of New Zealand was forced to delay a hike in the wake of the latest lockdown.
Like Australia, New Zealand’s early success has raised the stakes more than ever. As an outbreak of the Delta strain threatens to shatter normality, the country’s low vaccination rate leaves it particularly vulnerable. The low rates of inoculation show the shortfalls of the “wait and see” stance that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s government took last year. As international peers more blighted by the coronavirus scrambled to secure doses last autumn, Wellington was more ponderous, awaiting trial information and calling for worse-affected nations to be prioritized.
Most of a year has passed since the first shots arrived on the market, but just a fifth of Kiwis have been double-vaccinated, with supply constraints a major factor in the hold-ups.
“People are wondering how honest the government was initially about its reasons for the slow vaccine rollout,” says Prof. Norman Gemmell, of the University of Wellington.
Ardern’s strategy was dealt a totemic blow earlier this month, when Amazon said that production of its Lord of the Rings series, which has a budget of more than $1 billion, would shift from New Zealand to the U.K., despite incentives totalling tens of millions of Kiwi dollars.
Amazon has held back from explaining the rationale for the decision, but there is a widespread suspicion that New Zealand’s tight border controls played a major role. The loss carries a long tail for New Zealand’s heavyweight tourism sector. There’s a fear too that other major companies may soon take similar steps and put off investing in New Zealand out of concerns over how difficult it is to get workers in.
There’s certainly no shortage of people wanting to enter the country under the current system. The government’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine booking system, under which arrivals can book hotel places, is fully booked until the end of November. For the roughly one million Kiwis living abroad, there will be question marks over whether they can return for Christmas in the current climate.
“The government is giving thought to how we can reduce the barriers of the fortress ... which we’re going to have to do,” says Grimes.
Like their Australian neighbours, New Zealanders face a touch-and-go future. Widespread vaccination is within reach by the early months of 2022 if supply keeps up, but Ardern still faces a difficult decision over whether the country should maintain its “fortress” mentality and accept becoming an economic pariah, or take a gamble and join the rest of the world in accepting the virus as part of life.
Gluckman concludes: “How long can we keep shutting ourselves off from the world? It’s not clear.”