A year of living cautiously
How might the capital look one year on from lockdown? Joel Maxwell reports.
Even the most dangerous illness can start with a tickle.
It was a strange thought that everything began with a single person somewhere in the world, a cough, a tingle of fever – tenderness in the muscles, heaviness in the lungs: nothing too serious.
The brutality of the virus, however it started, was undeniable. We thought politics, weapons, money, love, could trigger global change – but in the end it just took a clump of protein with an inexplicable, unstoppable urge to reproduce.
Now, from an imaginary perspective 12 months after the Covid-19 lockdown, Wellington is breathing more freely again.
But over the last year, when you thought about that single first case, you also slowly realised there was no going back.
To Wellingtonians, the cruise ship industry in the city seems like a quaint memory now: those busloads of visitors transferring from the ship and wandering through Lambton Quay.
The cruise ship industry was never going to return quickly – quite aside from the restrictions on the borders a year after lockdown as the world awaits its vaccine.
And even if we had the vaccine already, people would still be frightened of being locked up on a ship thanks to one, maverick antivaxxer.
Besides, there are whispers the vaccination might not start till 2022 anyway.
Sure, the vaccine was created late last year but it isn’t rolling out yet: international production is slow, and the Government is still working out the details of a nationwide vaccination programme. Just getting out the flu vaccine last winter seemed like a bit of a chore.
In the meantime, downtown has never been the same.
One of your friends is working at home four days and only heading into the city once a week. In fact, it seems lots more people are working from home, more days of the week. All it took was a push from the virus to show that not only was it possible – it was inevitable.
Changes like this have big impacts, you’ve learned.
Was it only February 2020 that politicians were talking about fasttracking things like a second Mt Vic tunnel for traffic?
Before the lockdown the fight over roads – how much should be spent, and how quickly – had been bitter. Now, years spent wrangling over whether building more, bigger roads was necessary might have been rendered pointless by a virus.
The new reality can’t be ignored. There really are fewer commuter cars on the roads. And this switch to working from home is drawing more businesses to the suburbs, and more traffic from the CBD. Cafes are migrating away from the central city – one of your friends who runs a coffee shop downtown is on the hunt for space in Tawa!
Wherever you live or work in the region, the entertainment here has not returned to the old ways either.
Wellington is getting a glut of great New Zealand groups, bands, speakers. And why not? Our entertainers aren’t willing to go overseas yet.
But you really are desperate to see someone who doesn’t have that vowel-crushing Kiwi accent.
During the lockdown you hadn’t really thought about those concert tickets you’d bought, but after a while you realised international performers would not be returning in a hurry. The cursed year 2020 came and went, and the big bands are still not returning.
Our border controls were what protected us from the virus. Even when we dropped to alert level 1, which looked pretty normal to start with, the border controls were still tight.
So of course touring was never going to be popular with international entertainers – they had to wait two weeks in quarantine before they could even step on the stage, and then they lost more weeks when they went to the next country.
As for your own travel, that changed too.
You left town for two weeks at the start of the new year to tour the East Coast.
You paid for that with money saved up over the last three years to tour the US – a lifelong dream.
Instead of New York, you got Gisborne. It was a comfort (a small one, admittedly) that you had kept your money in the country.
Of course, Gisborne might not be the Big Apple, but it feels much safer.
Looking at the US now, it’s obvious it’s going to be a long while before you visit, even if you started saving again. The sheer scale of the viruses’ spread back in those early days, a year ago, means it is still a nation in the grips of figurative and literal delirium.
There’s no going back for any nation now, but at least here we don’t face high unemployment mortal fear.
You were talking to a friend the other day about where we should go from here, and he said even if we wanted to go back to the old normal, we shouldn’t.
We can’t go back to where we were, he said. The worst mistake would be trying to recreate yesterday.
The threat of climate change, for instance, had never changed, it was just bumped out of the headlines.
The virus gives us a working example of how things can change when they have to, he told you – even though to many, change is the most frightening word in the English language.
At first, you were not so certain whether we should forget the past so quickly. But, after all, hadn’t the impacts of Covid-19 shown that cutting our daily travel, decentralising, could work? Wasn’t the air clearer in and around the city as winter started in Wellington after those few weeks of lockdown?
We should use the experience of the pandemic, and the challenges, to just keep going, he said.
There is no going back.
Economist Brian Easton and former prime minister Jim Bolger were interviewed as part of the research for this article.