China shows the perils of Zero Covid
The emotional scenes as families and friends were reunited at Auckland airport for the first time in two years exemplified the heartache caused by Zero Covid isolationism. New Zealand cut itself off from the rest of the world in March 2020 but people from more than 60 countries are now able to enter if they are vaccinated and have tested negative for the virus.
It has been a long haul for the country and one justified by its prime minister Jacinda Ardern by the low death toll compared with the rest of the world, just 713 in a population of five million.
Some say that the UK should have done the same at the outset of the pandemic, maintaining that, as an island, we could have kept the virus at bay. But New Zealand and Australia, which also closed its borders, escaped the worst ravages of Covid in the early stages partly because it was summer in the Southern Hemisphere. They also did not have thousands of citizens returning from skiing holidays bringing the contagion with them, as happened here. As a result, they could bear down on outbreaks and close their doors to incomers in order to keep Covid out.
However, while efforts were made to maintain normality within the closed borders, lockdowns were also used whenever cases were detected. Some Australian cities, such as Melbourne, were subjected to even harsher restrictions than in the UK, with the Zero Covid strategy abandoned only once vaccination rates were high.
Historians will have to judge whether the approach of the antipodean nations was the right one. But those who regard Zero Covid as a template for handling future respiratory disease pandemics should look to China for evidence of its impracticality bordering on derangement.
Shanghai, the world’s biggest port and a city of 23 million people, remains in a lockdown so excessive that some of its residents say that they are starving because they cannot get food. Beijing is tightening restrictions as well, as the virus spreads again into the elderly population, which has not been vaccinated to the same extent as in the West.
The knock-on impact, both socially and economically, is growing and the ramifications for global trade and prosperity are immense, especially for a country like ours so heavily reliant on imports. It is good to see New Zealand open again; when will we be able to say the same of China?