A look inside a city MIQ facility
A patch of grass at a Hamilton isolation facility has become a bookable sunbathing spot.
It’s easy to imagine how appealing the green space could be after a few days in a hotel room, with allocated exercise and health check times the only opportunities to get out.
Touches like this are how the staffers at Distinction Hamilton Hotel – and colleagues around the country – try to make returnees’ fortnight in isolation more pleasant.
Managed isolation and quarantine facilities have now been running for a year in Aotearoa. There have been absconders and transmission mysteries, but almost 900 cases of Covid kept at the border.
As a travel bubble opens with Australia and more countries progress with vaccinations, a new phase of managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) is arriving.
Facility closures aren’t on the cards at the moment, MBIE deputy chief executive, managed isolation and quarantine, Megan Main said on a recent visit to Hamilton.
‘‘We’re planning on having MIQ in some form for at least the next year, maybe longer.’’
About 500 spaces will be kept free as a contingency, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has talked about using other space for purposes such as reuniting families or bringing in workers, Main said.
‘‘One thing about Covid is it’s all about tradeoffs. There’s no right or wrong.’’
Returning Kiwis also still have facilities booked out until the end of May, Main said.
She and fellow joint MIQ head Brigadier Jim Bliss visited Distinction Hamilton while it was closed for planned maintenance, and said the impact of global vaccine rollouts is the great unknown.
‘‘We still need to understand
. . . the vaccine and the effect it will have on populations before we can leap to decisions for that,’’ Bliss said.
More than 130,000 people have been through MIQ since New Zealand’s first hotels were contracted in April 2020. Distinction Hamilton Hotel & Conference Centre was one of three Kirikiriroa facilities to follow in late June.
‘‘We got 48 hours’ notice, to set up and be done and have people arrive,’’ manager Carla Denmead said.
She’d been preparing for redundancies but now all her staff have jobs. ‘‘That’s a huge thing’’.
Check-ins changed, though. ‘‘You can’t use the pool and the restaurant’s not open . . . You give them the key and off they go,’’ she said.
Once returnees are in their rooms, staffers don’t cross the threshold.
‘‘There’s no dinner for 400 with a big function and a party at the end. Most of my calls are ‘Can I get some toilet paper?’ ‘Can I get a coffee?’ ’’
Denmead and her staff have also gone from corporate hotel to being a team with groups such as Waikato DHB, the NZ Defence Force, and iwi Waikato-Tainui.
And, despite level 4 caution, staffers faced stigma.
‘‘It’s the immediate assumption that you’re putting everyone else in danger by being in the community,’’ Denmead said.
Some employees left after pressure and questioning from friends, family or schools.
Others weren’t invited to Christmas or family functions, said Lisa Maxwell, the charge nurse manager and operations manager across the Hamilton facilities.
That affected them, said Maxwell, a Waikato DHB employee. It seems to be changing now workers can get the vaccine, but said stigma picks up any time an issue is in the media.
Since the interview, news has broken that two workers at Auckland’s Grand Millennium Hotel had tested positive, one of whom was unvaccinated and had no recorded Covid tests since November.
Distinction Hamilton staffers had on-site vaccinations with a celebratory atmosphere, Denmead said.
Everyone got a goody bag and a round of applause after their mandatory post-jab wait.
‘‘There were a few who were hesitant, who just needed a bit more information, that’s all fine
. . . Some of them that weren’t keen on the first round were in boots and all the second round, to get their first ones.’’
Meanwhile, nursing teams in MIQ may do dozens of swabs in a day, and Maxwell oversees the people making it happen.
‘‘Kids are the hardest [to swab] . . . probably from about 6 to 10 or 11,’’ Maxwell said
Lollipops, iPads, and any other distractions staffers and parents can think of tend to be employed.
Looking back over a year of MIQ, MBIE’s Main was most proud of setting up the system mid-pandemic, with no playbook.
‘‘We, almost overnight, had to stand up a 4000-plus workforce, all the policies, procedures, for something that hadn’t been done before.’’