New Zealand to open quarantine-free “travel bubble” with Australia
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It’s common for people to be refreshing the MIQ website constantly for weeks trying to find a slot (I’m not exaggerating), including getting family and friends to help find slots. It’s an incredibly unfair system and removing the large number of Kiwis in low risk Australia from competing against returnees from higher risk countries makes sense all around.
I just hope the border is fully reopened once the vaccination program has reached enough people (>80% seems enough to me ... there will be some vaccine holdouts I’m sure!).
There are multiple issues with the booking system which enable this.
I’ve notified them of these issues multiple times, they did nothing.
It then became news, and was reported publicly multiple times, and still there were no changes.
Before this vulnerability was widely known making a booking was not all that difficult. After it became widely known there was not a single booking available in the system.
Go figure.
Yeah the system is broken. Lots of people were running tools to automate bookings in order to find and secure a date, given how quickly they get snapped up. It’s marginally harder now they are using a captcha.
But while they stated they would cancel duplicate bookings at the time, that's only regarding confirmed bookings. A user can still hold a booking for 48 hours while "booking flights", and with a 48 hour window its easy enough to time the release of said booking at the lowest volume booking period and attempt to snap it back up within few seconds with a second account.
Additionally, there is no validation beyond the email address. Name & passport are simple string fields, and you can have many different names / passports under a single account. That's all before you go all out and make 100's - 1000's of accounts.
I'm being a bit harsh, I was generally impressed with the quality of the booking system and how quickly they got it up. But once it's been out for a few months, and the cracks are starting to appear AND those crack become public it's just not good enough.
It becomes another class based system where: Priority 1) those with contacts within the department / ministry or some other method of getting special treatment Priority 2) those who can bot / exploit the system to get what they need Priority 3) those willing to pay to access priority 1 or 2. Priority 4) everyone else, ie: the public.
And this isn't getting tickets to a sporting event. This is "I want to go home to NZ because I've lost my job in Australia and I can't afford to pay rent" or "my mother is sick and I'd like to see her and spend a few moments before she passes". If priorities are to be made, they shouldn't be on class & connections.
Secondly, Australia's hotel quarantine has been at capacity since June, and limits the number of arrivals quite aggressively.
Even if the case numbers (~140M worldwide) were underreported by 80% (i.e. that there are five times as many cases as we actually know about), it still would just amount to only roughly 10% of all people worldwide.
It's been reported that more than half of the UK population now has Covid antibodies, either through recent infection or through vaccination:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/30/about-50-of-pe...
https://www.sanquin.nl/over-sanquin/nieuws/2021/03/corona-an...
Interestingly, the percentage is higher (26%) in the southern provinces of Limburg and Noord-Brabant, which were hit hardest by the first wave due to a combination of Carnival (only celebrated in those areas) and differently timed February school vacations.
Some of this probably is a vaccination effect- they've noticed that women were more likely to have antibodies than men, and more of the female donors were healthcare workers.
I didn't say that a part of the world has natural immunity, just said that nobody has natural immunity in NZ, which is where we were a year ago.
Besides that, negligible in which context? Many countries have already had double digit % of their population having had a COVID infection which might not be enough, but it's also not entirely negligible, since it means that any new wave would be less steep than the wave beforehand.
a) I know of quite a few families where one or two members tested positive, but others did not. If the virus spreads as easily as we think, then it's extremely unlikely that all of the family didn't have it at some point.
b) Most of the people I know who have tested positive have had mild symptoms, I expect there are a lot of people who were asymptomatic or had very mild symptoms and just thought it was a cold.
c) After 5 months of lockdown, most people have given up following the guidance about not meeting up privately and wearing masks inside if you do, but the case numbers haven't gone out of control.
This also doesn't take into account vacinnations. We are at around 14% so far, so I wouldn't be surprised if total immunity is close to 50%.
Back in October - i.e. before the massive second wave most of the world saw over the winter - the WHO estimated that around 10% of the world's population had been infected with COVID [2]. It wouldn't be surprising at all if the number were substantially higher now.
The idea that case numbers are underreported by only 80% worldwide is extremely generous. That's pretty close to the CDC's estimate for the US (1 in 4.6) [3], and the US has per capita one of the most aggressive testing regimens in the world [4].
[1] https://covid19-projections.com/infections/us-sd
[2] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-10-05/...
[3] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104645/covid19-testing-...
So the pandemic will end for NZ the same way it will for every other country: when everyone has had a chance to be vaccinated. That should be some time this year for NZ. Some other countries will get there first, but the timing depends entirely on vaccine supply and uptake, and has nothing to do with how far COVID has spread through the population.
If that happens before a mutation spreads which renders the vaccines useless. And, seeing the pace at which vaccination is progressing in poorer countries, I'm not really optimistic about that. On the other hand, there is still hope that the vaccine will at least keep you from getting seriously sick if you get infected with a vaccine-resistant strain...
See also https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/06/global-rollout...
Australia and NZ's risk profiles are different from pretty much anywhere else in the world right now. On that level, it's not a particularly reckless move.
That said, I understand the hesitation that a lot of people, particularly from NZ have. Our positions (both NZ and Australia's) have been hard earned, and one major slip up could make it all count for nothing.
Fiji hasn't had a single covid case in the wild in a year, with all our covid patients being detected in quarantine and isolated until recovery.
No bubble with us though. The Aussies get it first.
That said, my point was that opening NZ up to Australia (and vice versa) is a very different scenario to opening up to eg the US, France or the UK.
Until we have widespread vaccination, I'm not comfortable with this.
That said the economy cant hold like this forever.
The good news is that the chance of an outbreak occurring that would somehow affect your father is unbelievably low. We've had no such outbreak since the initial one last March. Since then the systems we have put in place to prevent, detect and eliminate outbreaks have (all together) worked, and they have only gotten better, especially in the last couple of months as almost all our border/MIQ workers are now fully vaccinated. Australia's have too.
That said, this isn't just trying to get some tourist dollars into NZ. Given the large migration between the two countries there are lots of families which are split across the two who will now be able to visit their relatives - they'll be pretty happy to see this news.
The other possibility might be that earlier on in the pandemic they may have thought that a suppression strategy was possible, but it turned out that it's infectious enough and behaves randomly enough (eg. occasionally huge clusters, many cases asymptomatic) that it really doesn't allow much room for suppression strategies & elimination strategies to be much different from each other.
I think community transmission is already seen as a failure whether the government likes it or not, so they might as well call it elimination.
I heard that the NZ tourism industry had one of its best years yet in 2020 with all the domestic tourism that went on.
We do indeed need more immigrants and more housing. First one won't happen as managed isolation facilities will be closed, vaccination is unclear at what stage and skilled-migrant visa class is abolished. Second won't happen as government (incl. Jacinda) is committed to protecting investors from going into negative equity.
Possibly true by numbers, but in 2018-2019 tourism revenue was about 60/40 domestic/international. https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/tourism-satel...
> skilled-migrant visa class is abolished
I don't think that's true. https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/apply-for-...
> government (incl. Jacinda) is committed to protecting investors from going into negative equity.
I would have agreed with you until last week's announcements, but Labour has clearly decided to not chase the votes of property investors.
> Labour has clearly decided to not chase the votes of property investors.
Still investors can use equity as deposit which is gonna keep the train moving up. Plus silly cost of subdividing means you have dairy enjoying million dollar views.
Here's the stats: http://snug.org.nz/assets/Uploads/03-SNUG-11-March-2021.pdf
I'm as critical of our current government as the next guy (probably more), but it's also fair to say that every previous government in the past few decades has also failed on all these fronts (except COVID vaccine rollout, of course, but there's no reason to think that e.g. National would have done any better there).
Most of the rest of the world are still in some form of lockdown and have been on and off for over a year
Yes, we are very privileged to live in a time where there is literally no other problem in the world that even comes close.
Sorry for the snark, but this attitude is so incredibly ... Western. It really grinds my gears that so many people have collectively decided that all other forms of suffering and damage are irrelevant as long as we come closer to this one single objective.
> Most of the rest of the world are still in some form of lockdown
Most of the rest of the "first world".