Will 2022 be the year we reconnect the ‘hermit kingdom’?

“I do understand why people look at that and think ‘gosh, what’s the logic here?’,” Covid-19 Response Minister ​Chris Hipkins says. “There’s a logic to it, it does require a bit of working through.”

Hipkins was replying to questions from a Health Select Committee in November about keeping the managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) system in place for every incoming traveller, despite an outbreak of Covid-19 in Auckland.

The logic of MIQ was easy enough to explain early in the pandemic, but on the day Hipkins fronted up to that select committee, there were more cases of Covid-19 popping up in the community than in managed isolation.

In total, there were 197 community cases of Covid-19 in Auckland that day. None came in via the international border.

MIQ and closed borders have been a key feature of New Zealand’s response.

Cutting the country off from the rest of the world initially looked like the best response to the pandemic, when it meant a Covid-free New Zealand.

But as the virus spread around the country, more people have started to question how long that isolation could continue.

​Morgo founder ​Jenny Morel says the decision to retain MIQ through the latter part of this year has been a costly one for businesses.

Northern Hemisphere business conferences, an important part of how export businesses maintain relationships, run at the beginning and end of the year.

“I think we’ve done a lot of damage to our reputation by becoming the hermit kingdom.”

Northern Hemisphere businesspeople were less tolerant of their New Zealand counterparts not turning up for important meetings, she said, while foreign investors were less understanding that they could not travel to New Zealand to see the businesses they were being asked to invest in.

“There’s desperation to get moving again for two reasons: one because you haven’t been moving for so long, and two, because the rest of the world is,” ​Morel says.

Epidemiologist Michael Baker questioned the logic behind retaining MIQ for fully vaccinated travellers, as community cases ticked up, especially with the need to use these facilities to isolate community cases who couldn’t safely isolate at home.

In August, the prime minister outlined a “reconnecting New Zealand” strategy, under which the borders would be reopened in the first quarter of 2022, using risk-based settings.

Baker applauded the Reconnecting New Zealand plan when it was first announced, but thinks the case for a glacial re-opening of borders has almost completely evaporated.

“I think that timeline and process has changed radically. I thought the reconnecting strategy was pretty sound, and I was along contributing to the launch, but everything’s changed because of the Delta variant outbreak,

“And New Zealand has shifted to a suppression approach, which was not anticipated, we were going to be elimination until early next year.”

The report, formulated by ​David Skegg’s ​Strategic Covid-19 Public Health Advisory group, imagines a future where the country spends months experimenting with different types of Covid-19 tests and home isolation pilots to see which might work best to safely allow vaccinated travellers to skip MIQ.

“It’s all changed, I mean basically now the risk equation is completely different,” Baker says.

“Things like that pilot scheme [for home isolation], you know, the careful reconnecting to the outside world I think has now been made fairly redundant.”

After Hipkins’ select committee appearance, he doubled down on MIQ at a 1pm press conference: “We do have to look at the picture of cumulative risk when we make decisions about the international border, and doing things at exactly the same time as we do them domestically potentially adds a lot of additional risk to the system all at the same time.

“And so I think people should expect to see things stepped out carefully so that we can keep control of the situation rather than do things all at once which means potentially we don’t.”

Prime Minister ​Jacinda Ardern jumped in a little bit later to say the plan was still going ahead.

A week later, the “cumulative risk” had evaporated, and the Government announced a plan to allow vaccinated New Zealanders in from Australia in January, all countries in February, with non-NZ citizens to follow in April, although all would have to self-isolate.

The Reconnecting NZ plan imagined a world where vaccinated travellers would be triaged according to vaccination status and the country they came from. It was set to start by the end of the first quarter of 2022, effectively before the end of March.

Low-risk arrivals would be given a rapid antigen test on a(or irrival, and go into home isolation if they tested negative, or MIQ if they tested positive.

Now, systems to allow for faster testing, home isolation, and freer borders are within reach, but there are questions around whether the Government wants to use them.

Thousands more tests will likely require better data systems, for a start. Stuff reported testing data systems were coming under strain from data that had to be entered in twice a week.

Rako Science chief science officer ​Stephen Grice says key elements to enable freer borders could be rolled out within three days. His company even pitched some of the systems that might be needed to the Ministry of Health.

Grice’s concept is an “e-gate” type system, the type of streamlined automated travel gates used for travellers from places like Australia.

His company have been trialling the elements of it for travellers leaving the country, Rako Science is a major supplier of pre-departure PCR saliva tests to people departing from Auckland Airport.

People who come in to get a saliva test pre-register their details online and scan their passport at a kiosk when they get to the airport. The kiosk automatically labels a saliva collection container with a barcode linked to those details. A passenger then just has to dribble into the container and hand it over for processsing.

​Grice’s idea is to adapt this type of system for incoming travellers, and make it more automated so that an incoming passenger can swipe their passport, then take and drop off their sample without the need for human supervision.

This would remove some bottlenecks in bringing people through the airport in a world where more testing is required. That will be important because the number of people passing through the borders are expected to increase once quarantine requirements are loosened.

“All you would do is insert that into the logistics of people arriving at Auckland Airport, Christchurch Airport and Wellington Airport.

“People, they’re tired when they get off the plane, but honestly it’s a two or three-minute task.”

IGENZ clinical microbiologist ​Arthur Morris says the important thing is to test incoming travellers with a sensitive PCR test before they enter the community, not simply on arrival at the airport.

Rapid antigen tests are best at detecting Covid-19 when people show symptoms and are infectious, so there is a case for testing people with a rapid antigen test before they get on to a plane, but less so when they will likely be going into home isolation regardless of their test result.

​Morris argues rapid antigen tests could slow things down: who will teach people how to use these tests at the airport, where will hundreds of people wait while their rapid antigen test results come through (a process which can take up to half an hour), and how will the process of entering or verifying these self-generated results take place?

​Morris wonders if it is even necessary for people to have their test results before they leave the airport, especially as all travellers will have had pre-departure PCR tests, and would not have been allowed to board the plane if they were showing symptoms of Covid-19.

The original Reconnecting NZ plan envisaged rapid antigen tests being used to determine whether people would isolate at home or at a managed isolation facility, but now even community cases of Covid-19 are isolating at home.

So, if a traveller were to test positive for Covid-19 with a rapid antigen test they would likely be told to quarantine at home anyway.

“They should go into isolation, or home isolation or whatever, and then get a negative test within 48 hours of arriving, a PCR test … then you can go about your business,” Morris says.

“I’m a fan of rapid antigen tests, I think they’ve got a place in the future for workplaces and other places, but I don’t see them as a sensible option for a rival test for travellers.”

Rako Science and the lab it contracts with, IGENZ, aren’t the only ones with ideas around the kind of technologies needed at the border, businessman ​Ian Taylor has been trying out a bunch of them, and a Government-run self-isolation pilot is underway too.

​Morel says opening up is necessary for export-oriented businesses, many of whom have staff spread across several countries.

It will be impractical for many of these companies to be run remotely for much longer. A lot of business travel that can be done over videoconference will stay virtual, but…