Government of New Zealand announced on Thursday that it will no longer require incoming travellers to undergo quarantine and will reopen its borders, a move that will be welcomed by thousands of citizens who have been waiting for long periods of time to return home.
New Zealand has implemented some of the world’s strictest border controls since the outbreak began. The majority of incoming travellers must stay in a military-run quarantine hotel room for ten days, causing a bottleneck at the border.
Thousands of lives were saved as a result of the measures, which also allowed New Zealand to eliminate or control several coronavirus outbreaks.
However, in a world where the virus is becoming endemic and in a country where the omicron variant is already spreading, border controls are increasingly seen as out of date. Due to the bottleneck, many New Zealanders living abroad were forced to enter a lottery-style system in order to secure a spot in quarantine and return home.
The system’s flaws were exposed this week by pregnant New Zealand journalist Charlotte Bellis, who was stranded in Afghanistan after New Zealand officials initially turned down her request to return home to give birth. Officials backed down after international pressure and offered her a spot in quarantine, which she accepted.
Vaccinated New Zealanders returning from Australia will no longer be required to enter quarantine as of the end of this month, and vaccinated New Zealanders returning from the rest of the world will be able to do so by mid-March. At home, they will still be required to isolate.
Most tourists, however, will have to wait until October to enter the country without having to stay in quarantine. Those who haven’t been vaccinated will still have to go through quarantine.
Many people associate border controls with heartbreak, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, but they have undeniably saved lives.
“There is no question that for New Zealand, it has been one of the hardest parts of the pandemic,” she said. “But the reason that it is right up there as one of the toughest things we have experienced is, in part, because large-scale loss of life is not.”
She said the controls “meant not everyone could come home when they wanted to. But it also meant that Covid could not come in when it wanted to, either.”
Ardern claimed that the restrictions had allowed New Zealand to strengthen its defences against the virus by achieving high vaccination rates while maintaining a strong economy.
According to Our World in Data, about 77 percent of New Zealanders are fully vaccinated. According to health officials, this number rises to 93 percent among those aged 12 and up.
Only 53 people have died as a result of the virus in New Zealand’s population of 5 million people.
After a pandemic lull, New Zealand’s economy quickly recovered, and unemployment fell to 3.2 percent in the most recent quarter, the lowest level since records began in 1986. However, the government has increased borrowing dramatically, causing home prices to skyrocket.
The reopening of the border was welcomed news for opposition leader Christopher Luxon, whose National Party has long called on the government to “end the lottery of human misery.”
It was, according to Ardern, a first step toward normalcy.
“There was life before, and now life with Covid, but that also means there will be life after Covid too, a life where we have adapted, where we have some normality back, and where the weather can once again take its rightful place as our primary topic of conversation,” Ardern said. “We are well on our way to reaching that destination. We’re just not quite there yet.
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