My 10 year-old son woke up at 2am last night and was surprised to discover me awake reading in bed. I explained that I was looking at properties to buy in New Zealand but that they currently aren’t allowing any outsiders to visit their island nation. Don’t get the idea that I have the money to buy investment properties. I’m just so desperate to find a way for my son to have a normal childhood that I had to look into my options.
Of course, I also looked at some more touristy sites, including for areas near homes that I found interesting. Those sites now have advisories that no travel is permitted to New Zealand, so I decided to investigate their policy. And that led me to their COVID-19 policy for citizens, who are permitted to come and go. The experience made me want to cry when I considered the impossibility of America following a similar course.
It’s been 100 days since New Zealand has reported a single case of COVID-19. Here’s why:
While our borders are closed, New Zealand citizens and permanent residents have a legal right to come home. Those returning to New Zealand have a responsibility to do their part to stop COVID-19 spreading in New Zealand by completing 14 days in isolation before safely returning home.
How is this accomplished?
New Zealand has managed isolation and quarantine facilities located throughout the country. All facilities are located within hotels.
The facilities are closely monitored to make sure that measures are in place to keep New Zealand safe.
Selection criteria
All hotels selected for managed isolation or quarantine need to meet a strict set of criteria. This is to ensure that people staying and working in them are kept safe and that there’s a safe transition of people back into the community after their isolation period.
Some of the criteria hotels must meet include:
- security and entry/exit points
- suitable room and bathroom facilities
- adequate provision of food and drink delivered to rooms
- safe laundry protocols
- ability to ensure people’s wellbeing through the provision of online access and services.
Sole use
None of the hotels being used for quarantine or managed isolation are currently open to other guests. The Government holds exclusive use of the hotel facilities.
How many people does this government program require to operate?
There are over 500 government and contracted staff directly supporting managed isolation and quarantine. Each quarantine and managed isolation facility has an All-of-Government support team.
Staff on the ground at our managed isolation facilities have stood at the frontline of New Zealand’s defence against COVID-19, doing essential work to ensure people can complete their stay safely and comfortably.
Each team works alongside facility management to support the health, wellbeing, security, supplementary logistics and administration of the people staying in the facility.
Each team has representatives from:
- Ministry of Health (health and wellbeing)
- Defence (administration and logistics)
- Police and Aviation Security (security)
- Ministry of Social Development (welfare).
The size of each team varies slightly based on facility capacity and the extra support required. For example, there are more health professionals at a quarantine facility than a managed isolation facility.
The multi-agency teams are responsible for managing the facilities and providing health and wellbeing support, security and assistance to guests, hotel staff and other government agency personnel.
Obviously, America is a much bigger country with many more citizens seeking to enter the country after trips abroad, so we would need many times more than 500 employees to do anything similar. Fortunately, we have somewhere near 40 million people looking for work, though, so it would be a snap to fill the positions.
Also, I want to reiterate that New Zealand has not had a confirmed COVID-19 case in 100 days.
For practical, political, and geographical reasons, Americans cannot shut themselves off from the world the way New Zealand can. But we can get this virus under control if we’re willing to work together and make sacrifices. Tourism is the second biggest industry in New Zealand, so it’s not like this isn’t painful for them.
But even without Trump’s horrible leadership, we just don’t seem to have the same communal spirit here. We can do better, but it’s depressing to realize that we’re simply incapable of doing this right.
Move up here. Good schools, medicaid expansion, lowest covid rates in the country, lots of mountains and rivers, close to the shore, and real estate isn’t too expensive.
Where are you, Brendan? Maine?
Vermont!
If community colleges were hiring at my seniority level, I’d be interested. As it is, job market in my profession has dried up to nearly nothing.
Spent 3 weeks touring the North Island of NZ with my wife in March 2017. Absolutely loved it and everyone we met. Having been born and reared in Hawaii, much seemed familiar to me (landscapes and vegetation as well as the Maori culture and the country’s violent colonial past which wiped out so many and so much of the Maori and their culture).
For a month afterwards, in idle moments, I would investigate what it would take to emigrate from the US to NZ. Unfortunately, I’m about 20-25 years too old (I’m 52) and don’t have the type of “practical” career they desire (engineering, medical, electrician, plumber, etc) for immigrants.
However, I have a client whose net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and her family has bought citizenship there for $600k or so, plus buying property. So if you’re rich (as is mostly the case), you too can escape to NZ when the revolution (or counter revolution) comes for you no matter what job you have or don’t have!
My wife is hoping to retire later next year, and I at the end of 2022. We are actually starting to have some small conversations as to whether we want to try and pull up our roots and seek a place to live out our days which doesn’t carry all of the nasty emotional and psychological baggage that comes along with living in most parts of this country. I just don’t see any real upside to continuing to put ourselves through the trauma that is going to be associated with being a citizen of most of the states in this country for the foreseeable future. If there are some parts of the country which can give us a modicum of peace and contentment, then we will certainly consider that, but I’m not opposed to seeking out places outside of the U.S., if it turns out we can afford to do that sort of thing.
Even if Trump is defeated in November, and he actually leaves without instigating a civil war, the future here looks simply horrible. We have lost so much ground, particularly in the last four years, that I just don’t see Ohio as being a place I want to live out the rest of my days. I have parents in their 80’s, so as long as they need me to be close, I will stay here. But after they pass I simply have no reason to stay here. For my and my wife’s peace of mind and emotional sanity, it just seems like it might be time to just pack up and move on.
I could see myself moving within the United States. But if I moved overseas, it would be hard to see my adult children, my father, my in-laws, my sister or niece.
It would be good because you’d have fewer deaths and less economic destruction until there’s a vaccine, but I’m just not convinced anyone knows the ideal strategy for combatting this. Trump has obviously fucked up immensely and has done everything wrong, but Cuomo and de Blasio euthanized a lot of their elderly population without any assistance from Trump.
I want to see the Fall and Winter seasons first before celebrating any one country’s strategy.
It’s midwinter in NZ right now
Yes, and they managed to keep it out before it could spread at all. Which is good, but cannot be replicated by many other polities. Further, they’re going to have to lift the restrictions at some point, and when they do are they going to get the virus anyway?
There’s some evidence (not conclusive) that there is some sort of burn out at 10-20% infection rate, but I don’t think we know this for sure without seeing what happens in the fall and winter with already hard hit areas. So NYC has an infection rate of around 30%. Do they continue to tick up to 50%, 60%? Or is the likelihood of further outbreak infinitesimally small because of so many people contracting the virus mixed with others who are asymptotic for whatever reason?
See also Louisiana which has had two outbreaks. But it wasn’t “Louisiana”, it was different regions within Louisiana experiencing their “first” wave respectively, with New Orleans being hit first because of Mardi Gras and the rest of the state following the other regions of the south in the summer.
You must follow the same people I follow on Twitter 😉 . I do wonder about the potential for pre-existing immunity (see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-020-0389-z ).
There are a lot of cranks on twitter who overlap with the people making these arguments (cranks like Alex Berenson, who is a contrarian bullshit artist), but I’ve found it helpful to constantly question why some areas are hit hard and why are some spared and what’s making the difference. At first I thought it was perhaps because of masks, but something never sat right with that because there wasn’t any real linkage beyond “hey Japan masks up and doesn’t seem to be hit very hard”. Masks are also low risk intervention so I’m not sure there’s much harm in wearing one, and I’ve worn one since early-mid March.
At this point there’s a lot of uncertainty, but I think what can be concluded from a public health standpoint is that you can open up schools and it’s the “lesser evil” to keeping them closed, especially in hard hit areas like NYC. Open up windows if you can, and keep them ventilated. I guess we will see for sure when school starts in coming weeks in NYC.
If there is any truth to the burnout, then it’s a question of who in society is asked to bear the burden, and since children are extremely low risk, it could even be counterintuitively helpful if they’re the ones allowing for HIT as opposed to nursing homes and killing the elderly.
There’s something to T-cell immunity, but a lot of people who have had alphacoronavirus (common cold strains) exposure have died after contracting COVID-19. It’s not a magic bullet.
We were lucky to have visited NZ in December over Christmas vacations! It quickly supplanted Hawaii as my dream retirement. On South Island, it was almost like the beauty kept on growing exponentially along our route (from Christchurch to Queenstown to Te Anua to Milford Sound).
But one thing we learnt was Jacinda came to power by promising no easy purchase of property for foreigners. One has to live in NZ for 3 years before being able to buy property!
No matter, cannot wait to go back to explore other parts of this beautiful country with beautiful people and great cuisine and wines! Just wish the EQs were not so devastating!
Oops. Now there’s an <a href=”https://politicalwire.com/2020/08/17/new-zealand-delays-election-over-new-outbreak/”>outbreak</a> in Auckland and they’ve delayed their election until October.
I’ve been looking at places to go for about a decade now. Some places on the top of my list are New Zealand, Costa Rica, and the Netherlands.
New Zealand would be great because it’s about as far away from the US as possible, and they speak English. Costa Rica would also be nice because they don’t have a military, and are one of the most advanced countries in Central/South America Costa Rica also has a very large expatriate population and English is pretty commonly spoken there. And, it’s cheap compared to just about anywhere else. The Netherlands would also be amazing, but would be expensive and while almost everyone speaks English, you’d still need to learn Dutch to fully integrate.
I’m a Registered Nurse, so getting permission to immigrate into a lot of countries would be a lot more reasonable than a lot of other professions.
All of that said, I don’t really want to abandon my fellow citizens to fascism, even if it means that I’d have to put myself into danger.It’s a tough call.
People with money really can be international citizens. You don’t even need hundreds of thousands to buy citizenship, tens of thousands is enough to invest for residency.