More than a year on from MIQ’s beginning, the system is still constantly changing. Matthew Scott asks which new adaptations can be expected going forward.
Australia’s proposed move towards dedicated quarantine facilities may forecast how New Zealand’s border operations will work in future.
Continued outbreaks in the community and have finally convinced Australia to look into bolstering their border protection with a trio of specially commissioned facilities.
Hotels are still set to house the majority of people coming into the country, but after holes in the system such as the virus being passed over a hotel hallway in Adelaide, Australian officials want to house higher-risk arrivals in facilities designed to prevent the virus from spreading.
At home, government officials and media pundits are in agreement that the MIQ system hasn’t seen the end of its usefulness. However, gridlock on the booking system for rooms and worries about the more easily transmitted Delta variant have directed the discussion towards other options for the MIQ system.
Since April last year, returnees and migrants have been housed in hotels for two weeks before being granted freedom to roam. At the time, this was an elegant solution - maybe the only way to scale up quickly from the military base at Whangaparaoa used to quarantine the first repatriated Kiwis brought in from Wuhan last February.
But more than a year on, what other options are there for MIQ?
University of Otago epidemiologist Michael Baker said the system is world-class, but there is a good argument for dedicated facilities.
“It’s hard to do it right with hotels,” he said. “They weren’t designed to be quarantine facilities.”
He said hotels may not have a physical layout conducive to quarantine - as MBIE has tried to address this year with its renovations of ventilation systems in the Grand Millennium and Grand Mercure in Auckland.
Another factor is these buildings were not designed to have a flow of people keeping separate, and have a lot of indoor space that could provide the right conditions for the virus to hang around in an aerosol.
“There are things that are hard to retrofit into existing facilities,” said Baker. “This is why Australia is looking at dedicated facilities.”
The Government’s plan
Earlier this month, Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins said the Government was looking into different options for MIQ.
“Whether that’s buying them … leasing them… or doing something different,” he told RNZ.
Joint head of MIQ said it was early days, with the Government considering a range of approaches, including purpose-built facilities.
“The Ministry of Business Innovation & Employment is considering what facilities might be required over the medium-term to support the ongoing Covid-19 response,” she said. “This work is in the initial stages but is likely to encompass consideration of a range of options including the continuation of the existing system, the potential feasibility of any purpose-built facilities, timeframes, and costs.”
At this stage, no decisions have been made.
ACT leader David Seymour, who pitched his idea for a privatised MIQ system to the media earlier this week, said he saw dedicated facilities as a potential future option, but wasn’t sure it made sense at the moment.
“It’s difficult to see how the numbers stack up,” he said. “It would need to be a vast compound to house everybody coming through.”
Seymour said the answer to people being unable to book rooms in MIQ could lie in implementing a system where hotels provided managed isolation in a private capacity.
“The private sector could scale up the capacity to meet demand,” he said. “Whatever happens, it needs to be smarter, tighter, and with higher capacity.”
Stratification of the system
Baker said one thing that could be reasonably expected was further stratification of MIQ facilities and groups of arrivals.
This means different isolation criteria for people from countries with different levels of risk - an approach that began with restrictions on travellers from high-risk countries and the quarantine-free travel arrangement with Australia.
Further differences in what MIQ arrangements travellers with different points of origin would bolster the security of the system, said Baker.
“By far the most important decision New Zealand made was stratifying the risk,” he said. “Originally, people approaching zero percent risk were going in with higher-risk people. The decision to switch from one-size-fits-all to green zones and red zones was the best thing we did.”
Seymour also sees stratification as an important element of the system.
His privatised system would have facilities for only vaccinated people. “In a sense, stratification is built in with vaccination requirements,” he said.
Baker said the ideal approach would be dividing people into facilities by point of origin.
“The ability to have different countries in different facilities would be desirable,” he said. “We would be able to reduce requirements as vaccination rates go up and the pandemic is under control in parts of the world.”
However, he anticipates a continued need for high levels of security for some facilities.
“In other parts of the world, it will continue,” he said. “We do need the more secure tier of MIQ.”
For these people, he said dedicated quarantine facilities continued to be necessary.
“Dedicated quarantine facilities are important for people coming from high-risk countries,” he said. “A large group of infected people in a hotel is not an ideal situation.”
Checking out of hotels as MIQ
But what would an MIQ system look like if it weren’t based in hotels?
Baker said a dedicated separate quarantine facility would need to be somewhere away from residential areas, but potentially near the airport.
“It would need to be able to be repurposed for other uses,” he said. “Maybe as a hotel, or emergency accommodation.”
Seymour said he couldn't think of a better option than hotels, as he doubted the numbers would allow for a purpose-built facility at this stage.
“Another option could be in student accommodation or apartment buildings - although it’ll be hard to find one not being used."
With some of the mariners on Viking Bay, Mattina and Playa Zahara isolated on their own vessels, questions have been raised about the effectiveness of boats as quarantine facilities.
“In principle, ships sound like a good idea,” Seymour said. “But I think there would be a lot of resistance due to the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan last year.”
The Diamond Princess cruise ship’s contagion may have affected people’s willingness to isolate themselves at sea, although Seymour said the supply was there. “There’s a lot of ships floating around - no pun.”
He said if he were in Government he would assess whether ships should be put to use for this purpose.
“One good thing is it’s also very difficult to escape from a ship.”
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