Lockdown Blues

 I wrote a letter to the Irish Times “Emigration Generation” section in January that I’m glad they never published. I also put it up as a blog here, which I’ll leave up because it reflected how I felt at the time. I come here now with a confession. But one I’m not going to beat myself up over it. In the great words of Keynes, “when the facts change, I change my mind.”

Back in January, I had just returned from a two week break in the South Island of New Zealand. Pubs and restaurants were open and because there were no overseas tourists, it was easy to get accommodation. My emotional memo to the Irish Times was based on my strongly held belief that New Zealand was the best country in the world to be in, during these dark days of Covid 19. I wanted Ireland to follow New Zealand’s example and close its border to the outside world.

New Zealand enjoyed sixteen months or so of relative freedom while the rest of the world fought with the virus. We had less than thirty deaths and the hospitals ran smoothly without the need to cater for coughing, virus sufferers. There was the occasional blip when a case would sneak out of managed isolation, but we smugly patted ourselves on the back in these times, because a snappy, short-term lockdown tended to smother these outbreaks at birth.

Then Delta came along, and the whole ball game changed. There was an inevitability about this. All the other countries in the teacher’s pet section of the Covid classroom, such as Taiwan, Singapore and Australia, had succumbed to the latest variant and proved that the strategy of getting Covid numbers down to zero through a tough lockdown was futile. Delta is a different beast from what came before and spreads faster than a conspiracy on an anti-vaccination Facebook page.

On the 17^th of August, a single case crept out of a managed isolation facility and drifted across the Auckland night sky until it found a willing host. In line with the government’s strict and hard-line policy the country was plunged into full lockdown immediately and we all sat back in our protective bubbles and expected it to be over in a couple of days.

That was two months ago. I’ve been working from home in that time while trying to home school my daughter. I’ve had a lot of time to think as I sit at the kitchen table each day. It is clear now that New Zealand took a massive gamble that came very close to paying off but looks like it might fail at the final hurdle.

Due to geography and a strong left-wing government that prioritised public health, New Zealand kept Covid at bay while thousands died overseas and lockdowns became the norm. We lived a normal life here and became the poster child of left-leaning editorials all over the world. It was hard to open the Guardian or New York Times online and not find a glowing article about Jacinda or smug kiwis at sports games or music gigs.

Everybody knew that this was akin to keeping your finger in a dyke. Sooner, or later you’re going to have to fix the leak or the person providing the finger will collapse with hunger and exhaustion and the flood will come in. The gamble that New Zealand took was to kick off a vaccination program and hope that this would be high enough when the day eventually arrived that delta took hold within the community.

You can trace the day this bet went sour. Back in the middle of June, a limo driver in Sydney picked up an International flight crew. He was unvaccinated and wasn’t wearing a mask. More than 400 people have died in Sydney from Covid since that fateful taxi ride.

New Zealand has a close connection to Australia. Thousands of kiwis live over there and one of them brought the virus with them when they came home. The government shut the country down straight away but the genie was already out of the bottle. The numbers didn’t get out of control but almost from the first day, it was obvious that the public wasn’t quite as compliant as in the initial shutdown of 2020.

Back then, everything was novel. The whole world was shut down and the internet was full of Joe Wicks fitness videos and funny home movies. There was a sense that we were all in this together and New Zealand embraced this.

This time, there is a sense that the rest of the world has moved on. Pressure from business and right-wing parties to open up is rising every day. This is highlighting a fissure that runs through every aspect of New Zealand society. There is inequity here that most people overseas don’t notice. When they watch the All Blacks, they see a happy combination of white and brown people. When people come here on holiday, they don’t tend to spend time in poverty-ridden suburbs of Auckland and Wellington. And when you meet Kiwis overseas they will talk in glowing terms about how they treated their native population so much better than the Australians did.

But the truth is that Maori are disadvantaged in education, health, and pretty much every other aspect of society. Many of them live in cold and damp homes, so are most vulnerable to respiratory illness and to have underlying health conditions. They tend to work in the sort of businesses (such as Supermarkets) that have stayed open during lockdown.

When you add to this that many young Maori feel disconnected from society, then it’s not surprising that Maori vaccination rates are low and they are overrepresented in current cases.

If we open up early, many of these Maori will die from Covid. That’s the position New Zealand is in today. And while many people love Jacinda, I don’t envy her for having to make that choice.