Contact tracing key to Aussie travel
A trans-tasman bubble cannot be formed unless New Zealand and Australia integrate their Covid-19 contact tracing systems, experts say.
Air New Zealand chief executive Greg Foran recently told the Sydney Morning Herald that quarantine-free travel between Australia and New Zealand was unlikely for at least another six months.
Earlier in the year Foran, and others, were optimistic a transTasman bubble would be opened by September however, those hopes were dashed following a severe Covid-19 outbreak in Victoria and a resurgence of cases in Auckland.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has said she wants Australia free of community transmission for 28 days before she will consider a quarantine-free travel bubble with Australia.
University of Auckland professor Shaun Hendy said safe travel bubbles could be formed with certain countries before a Covid-19 vaccine was made available, but zero community transmission was a requirement for the opening of a safe bubble.
Hendy’s work at Te Pu¯naha Matatini: The Centre for Complex
Systems and Networks has helped the Ministry of Health with Covid19 modelling scenarios.
Hendy said there were states in Australia where there was a reasonable level of confidence elimination status of Covid-19 had been achieved.
The most important, and perhaps challenging, part of setting up a trans-tasman bubble would be ensuring contact tracing was integrated between the two countries, he said. ‘‘The limiting factor probably is just about integration of our systems.’’
Sharing data across territories,
states and countries could be hard to do, he said. ‘‘There’s a lot of logistical issues.’’
Rapid testing may be a useful tool to incorporate into bubble travel, depending on the cost, accuracy and availability of tests, he said.
However, provided New Zealand and Australia continued with widespread community testing and surveillance measures, rapid testing would not be essential, he said.
Self-isolation would also not be necessary if the state or nation New Zealand entered a bubble with had good community surveillance of Covid-19, he said.
It largely came down to whether New Zealand trusted Australia’s systems as much as it trusted its own, he said. If that trust was there then, with a few protections, relatively free travel could happen.
Independent economist Benje Patterson, who specialises in aviation, said Foran’s predictions were not out of sync from what had been signalled from the Government.
Last week Treasury’s Preelection Economic and Fiscal Update (PREFU) assumed border restrictions would be lifted by the start of 2022, with some easing of border restrictions in mid-2021.
Patterson said a travel bubble with Australia could be opened either with free movement between both countries, or on a state by state basis. The latter allowed greater flexibility and was more likely to succeed from a public health perspective.
However, politically, it was much harder to achieve than full national travel, he said.
He said it was possible rapid testing and temperature screening would become part of bubble travel however, because of Covid-19’s long incubation period additional measures would be needed.
There may be a need for a shortened form of quarantine or self-isolating for arrivals into New
Zealand, he said.
Health checks once someone had already been in the country for a few days may also be necessary, he said.
The most important thing to get right was aligning contact tracing systems between New Zealand and Australia and ensuring that visitors were using the right contact tracing app, he said.
Trans-tasman Safe Border Group member and New Zealand Airline Pilots Association international director Tim Robinson said the aviation industry was ready to implement measures needed for a safe trans-tasman bubble, and had been for some time.
In anticipation of travel bubbles Auckland International Airport has built internal walls at its international terminal so it can be split into two self-contained processing zones.
One zone would be for people to travel to and from countries that New Zealand had formed a travel bubble with and another zone was for those arriving from all other countries.
Robinson said two issues that needed to be considered in opening the border were rapid testing and ensuring contact tracing systems were up to standard.
Once a bubble was set up with Australia it could act as a template for opening travel bubbles with other countries, he said.