‘COVID IS CONSTANTLY IN MY MIND’
Jacinda Ardern looks back with Claire Trevett on a year of pandemic and Fortress NZ
Almost a month after the first Covid case arrived in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern took the very rare step of taking over the airwaves for an “address to the nation”.
She sat at her desk on March 21, flanked by two New Zealand flags with a pot plant and her photo of Michael Joseph Savage behind her.
She was announcing something she later said she had not thought would ever happen in a democratic nation like New Zealand: plans for a lockdown of its people.
It was then that she first outlined the alert level system that has governed New Zealand life since. At that point, her aim was simply to “slow down Covid-19” to try to ensure the health system could cope.
New Zealand had 52 cases and Ardern put the country at level 2.
Level 3 came two days later, and the strict alert level 4 lockdown two days after that. But the four-week lockdown was so successful the “slowing the spread” goal turned into elimination, almost organically.
On June 8 — soon after New Zealand moved back to level 2 — it was announced there were no active cases of Covid-19. about that year — how it changed her, the country and what lies ahead.
The flags are gone but the pot plant and Savage are still there, as well as a mug holding her pens, with “Feminist Killjoy” written on it
Ardern is now very confident in her Prime Ministerial skin. There is nothing tentative about her leadership.
She has admitted suffering from a touch of self-doubt in the past — but if she, or others, ever thought she was not up to the job, the past year has dispelled it completely.
There is also optimism in her. The most recent community cases have been dealt with, with limited disruption to people’s lives.
The strategy of relying on contacttracing and testing to stymie new clusters without lurching into hard, long lockdowns has so far worked.
The leaders of other countries probably thought Ardern had it easy, given the virus’ impact in their own countries and the lockdowns that stretched into infinity.
But Ardern has talked about the “constant, grinding” anxiety that comes with leading during a pandemic.
“For the past year, Covid is constantly in my mind. Constantly. So now there are certain people, when they call, my question in my mind is
‘is this about Covid, or something else?’ And I won’t be alone in that. I’ve had conversations with other leaders, and this is just leadership at this time and place for all of us.”
She still steels herself a little bit each morning, just before her update is due to arrive.
She remembers hearing about that first case. It was February 28, and she was in Sydney for meetings with Australian PM Scott Morrison.
She had been told of a suspected case the day before, and was told it was confirmed just minutes before a press conference with Morrison. She did not mention it in that press conference, in which she instead gave Morrison the famous tongue-lashing over his Government’s deportations issue.
Then she gathered the New Zealand media and told them the news.
”[The Covid case] wasn’t unexpected. We were all preparing, but even then it was just that jarring reality that now it was on your doorstep as well,” she says now.
She has dealt with many cases since.
When it is observed that she seems more sure of herself as Prime Minister, she says few people would say a politician was lacking in confidence.
“Anyone who goes through tests of leadership either has to prove themself and come out the other side having proved themselves and I guess we’ve had a couple of those.”
Ardern says the year has given her perspective.
“I’m someone who has always sweated the small stuff. Within Covid, that particularly applies. I am a details person, and that has served me relatively well in this particular crisis we’ve faced. But it has meant everything else has become relative.
“When you, as a country, experience a one-in-100-year economic and health crisis, it puts everything else into perspective. So I sweat the small stuff with Covid.
“But I am sweating a little less the issue of the day that it’s often very easy to get caught up in.”
She remains confident the decisions she made throughout were the right ones — and sometimes the only ones — based on the information there was at the time they were made.
She says some of the steps she would take now, with the benefit of more knowledge about the virus and experience, would have simply seemed “irrational” earlier on.
“There are not many things where I look back and think ‘in that moment of time, there was something we missed that we could have done differently’, it’s always been with the experience that we adapted.”
Ardern has been criticised by the National Party for the length of time it took to close the borders and set up mandatory isolation and quarantine.
Borders were closed in early February to travellers from China followed by other hot spots. But a requirement for arrivals to self-isolate did not come until March 14 — and it proved impossible to police.
The blanket border closure to all but returning New Zealanders did not start until March 19, a few days before lockdown, and the current system of mandatory isolation for 14 days in MIQ hotels did not start until April 9.
Tens of thousands of New Zealanders made their way home in the interim — and the virus hitch-hiked with them.
Those early decisions are clearly
the ones Ardern has re-litigated in her head the most.
“You could look back and think ‘maybe at the very beginning, could we have prevented ourselves from having that lockdown we had to have if right at the beginning we shut down all our borders and put in quarantine straight away’.
“But even then, we had tens of thousands of New Zealanders trying to get back. We just would not have been able to physically create the capacity for them to be held in quarantine facilities, because a large number at that point did have Covid-19.
“Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, I’m not quite sure how we could have achieved that. But maybe one day I’ll have the chance to sit and reflect.”
Now the vaccines have started arriving, and with them some chance of a return to level zero — a land without the gates closed.
“We are definitely moving into a new phase. We’ll be adding in a new metric: the reach of the vaccination programme.
“And with that will come a new normal. It won’t solve things overnight, but we will, I hope, get to a place where Covid becomes like management of the flu — something we ask people to do annually. But with an extra layer to it, in the way we haven’t with the ‘flu.”
That, she said, would be the end of border controls and some other measures.
“We wouldn’t be asking people to be part of this vaccination campaign were it not for the fact we believe it will give us the opportunity to transition to a new way of living again — that the vaccine, eventually, will mean we won’t need to use other tools like border controls. That will get us close to normality again.”
AS FOR what that will mean for Ardern as Prime Minister, she has not travelled overseas since that visit to Australia.
She hopes to do so this year. After a year of fortress New Zealand, Ardern has to get out again to push New Zealand’s case.
Before that lie big decisions: when it will be safe to open the borders again, and remove the need for quarantine. That will depend on vaccination uptake at home: her key focus this year.
Any easing of quarantine before New Zealand is widely vaccinated would require evidence that vaccinated people coming in could not transmit the virus.
It has impacted on her Government’s other priorities — not least because of the cost of trying to ride out Covid-19. That saw billions of dollars going into wage subsidies and other measures.
But Ardern says for some it has only emphasised why the other priorities are important: poverty in particular. “If anything [Covid-19] has potential to exacerbate [poverty]. So our focus must increase.”
She has no doubt that Covid-19 has changed New Zealand society.
“You can’t go through something as extraordinary as this, and it not have an impact. I think there are the smaller things you would expect: I think we’ve had an appreciation for our back yard.”
When it is suggested it would be nice to see someone else’s back yard again sometime soon, she laughs and says there would be worse places to be “trapped”.
“If you’re going to be trapped anywhere, we have an appreciation for being trapped here.”
She says Covid-19 has also built a sense of community: in many cases, people were being asked to do something not to keep themselves safe, but to keep others safe.
“That was a big part of it right at the beginning. The concern was that young people, who were less likely to experience serious illness, we needed them to do something not for themselves but for the people around them. That has had an impact.”
She was always conscious of the risk of division around the need for lockdowns, and decreased tolerance for restrictions, especially as time went on.
She said nobody would benefit from pile-ons if someone did break the rules, because it could make people less likely to get tested.
“Any division when you’re tackling something like this has a really negative effect. So just trying to allow people the space to have an opinion, but at the same time making it work is a challenge we’ve had all the way through.”
She says she gets a fair few letters and drawing from children about Covid-19 “the bad, evil virus”.
Will an entire generation grow up with a hand-washing obsession? She laughs and tries to find a letter she was sent by a young girl dobbing in her father for his low-quality handwashing. “It was like ‘My daddy doesn’t wash his hands properly, he doesn’t use enough soap’.”
Ardern wrote back, saying she was sure her father would be very pleased with his daughter’s efforts to help him work it out.
“But I couldn’t help wondering if Dad knew this letter had been written, dobbing in his bad hand hygiene.
“Kids do really understand, but I hope that even through those really stressful moments, the little things like the Easter egg hunts and teddy bears in windows — New Zealanders have really tried to cushion what could otherwise be a pretty traumatic experience for kids. I think that’s amazing.”
As for Neve, Ardern says her daughter is young enough to have lived through it in a bubble of obliviousness. Neve is now almost 3. All she knew was that she couldn’t go to playgrounds for a while. “It was a bit too hard to explain to a 2-year-old. I went to start but I just don’t know how. So no.
“When I look at other countries, could I have a situation where my daughter is pretty oblivious to everything. If I lived in another country where there would not have been school and daycare for so, so long, and they wouldn’t have seen their friends. She knew she couldn’t go to playgrounds for a while, but really, her awareness has been pretty minimal.
“I count New Zealand lucky for that.”
‘We will, I hope, get to a place where Covid becomes like management of the flu . . .’