Like every law of physics, it is at the extreme that you understand if it works or not. And so is the case with the Covid lockdown policy.
New Zealand is by far the most isolated developed country you can find on Earth, lost in the South Pacific. And as such, if the lockdown strategy had any chance to work, this should have been it. But it did not as the article below explains.
As everywhere else, unending economic devastation for a few thousand sick people and 22 deaths: A catastrophic mistake of epic proportion. And as everywhere else, the solution is to double down on a failed policy...
How the
Virus Penetrated Jacinda’s Fortress New Zealand
New Zealand was supposed to show the world how the pandemic could
be halted. The island nation largely avoided
the first wave of the outbreak in March on the account of its remoteness and
the hasty imposition of border controls. [Or the fact it wasn’t the flu season.]
As the novel COVID-19 virus ravaged its way across the vulnerable populations
of Asia, Europe, and North America, New Zealand locked down its entire society.
On March 22, the nation’s government announced a
month of sheltering in place. The order came from on high with the stroke
of a pen, without legislative deliberation or
even the process of law. Enforcement persisted for nine days despite
having no legal justification – just an illegal executive
decree by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.
Months would pass before the country’s high
court censured this abrogation of democratic governance. It did not matter. Ardern’s actions were “unlawful, but justified”
to halt the pandemic, the bold actions of a “hero” who knew better than her own
people.
For the next month New Zealand operated under the strictest
lockdowns in the world, surpassing even communist China at the peak of its Wuhan region quarantine. The country reached an
astounding 96.3 out of 100 points on the Oxford lockdown stringency index.
“Act
like you have COVID-19” and stay home, came the order from above.
Stores and businesses were forcibly shuttered. Internal movement around the
country was forbidden, followed by restrictions on even leaving one’s own home,
save to obtain groceries or medicine. Ardern ordered the military to patrol
the streets for violators. Police set up a website to
encourage New Zealanders to report on neighbors who ventured outside for
unapproved reasons. New
Zealanders used it to file over 4,300 reports within the first week
alone. Arrests were made for “persistent
breaches” of the mandate.
The Prime Minister chasisted
her citizenry for disobeying, and directed them to use the police
snitch form – and all of this done at a time, as we now know, that her mandates
still operated outside of the cover of law
that it finally secured by post hoc legislative ratification in early April.
Ardern’s actions elicited barely a word of dissent, and
those who did speak out found themselves the subject of scolding mobs. How dare
they “question the science” – or the leadership of a rising progressive political
star. Instead, the media showered her with praise and puff-pieces about her
gimmicky uses of social media to soft-peddle the police state she had just
imposed.
New Zealanders needn’t worry about their slide into
autocracy – the Easter
Bunny and Tooth Fairy had been deemed “essential workers” and thus
exempt from the decree. The rule
of law had been sacrificed to epidemiology modeling and “nonpharmaceutical
interventions.”
Socialist
Cindy placed her entire country under
house arrest, and did so to thunderous applause for her boldness, her
heroism, and her “science”-driven leadership.
In the eyes of the press and much of the epidemiology profession, Ardern had
become a model of COVID leadership for the world to emulate.
New Zealand suspended its internal lockdown in mid-May after a month of shelter-in-place mandates and another half-month
at a level of stringency that exceeded all but the hardest-hit European
nations. In total, New Zealand police prosecuted
over 600 lockdown violators, and issued warnings to another 5,000.
To the adoring news media however, Ardern’s
leadership had proven an unambiguous
success. Owing to its early containment, COVID-19 never
really took root in New Zealand and the tiny number of cases that made it
through before the lockdowns proved to be a manageable number. “We are
confident we have eliminated transmission of the virus in New Zealand for now,” Ardern
announced in early June.
Like much of the world, the lockdowns left New Zealand’s economy in
tatters. The country posted its largest GDP
contraction in three decades for the first quarter of 2020. Much of
the contraction likely stems from the country’s tourism-heavy economy, which
seems unlikely to recover anytime soon as it is effectively proscribed for an
indefinite term by government mandate.
You see, Ardern’s strategy for lifting the internal
lockdowns rested upon maintaining one of the world’s most
restrictive border entry policies. The New Zealand border remains closed
for all intents and purposes for foreign visitors prohibited
save for a tiny number of exceptions. New Zealand residents who were stranded
abroad at the start of the pandemic – likely numbering in the tens of thousands
– may only return after going through a mandatory 14-day quarantine under
strict guard at a designated border facility.
Persons who do not qualify for a handful of exemptions must
also foot
the bill themselves – a total of $4,000 (NZ) for the privilege of
being cooped up in a government-managed hotel room. Ardern’s government has
also intentionally
restricted flights into the country as a strategy for rationing the
available quarantine spaces.
For all intents and purposes, Ardern created Fortress New Zealand – a bubble strategy in which the internal reopening rests entirely
upon the government’s ability to erect and maintain a nearly impermeable
barrier to entry from the rest of the world. Furthermore, such a strategy
must continue indefinitely until there is a coronavirus vaccine or cure.
It was supposed to be an occasion for celebration. New Zealand
passed the mark of “100
days without COVID,” we learned on August 9th.
New Zealand, it appeared, had beaten back and defeated the disease. Media
commentators across the globe proclaimed the strategy
victorious – an “emblematic champion of proper prevention and response
to the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.”
Epidemiologists used the occasion to proclaim vindication of
lockdowns, border closures, and “science-based” progressive government. “New Zealand is seen as a global exemplar,” announced the World
Health Organization’s Director-General in
an August 10th statement. A combination of strict
lockdowns, border closures, contact tracing, and enforcement had made New
Zealand “COVID-free,” and for that Ardern’s government “would make no apologies.”
The American media, which had already been championing
the New Zealand approach for months, touted the case as an example of
what could have been if only the United States and other countries stuck with
their lockdown strategies.
“In New Zealand, life is ordinary again after 100 days with
no community spread,” announced a triumphalist
report from NPR.
The 100-day mark also carried high political significance
for Ardern, who came to power in 2017 under a tenuous coalition arrangement
between the left-wing Labour Party with a smaller nationalist-populist
party best known for its hardline anti-immigration stance (Ardern
reconciled her coalition at the time by adopting immigration restrictions of
her own on the grounds that they would help to achieve “environmental
sustainability”).
Under normal times the Labour-New Zealand First coalition
might have expected a strong challenge from the center-right National Party,
which holds a plurality of seats in the New Zealand parliament.
But 2020 was meant to be the COVID election – a
victory lap for the governing coalition after having
successfully driven the disease from the island nation, as the external world
still struggled to contain the virus. Ardern used the 100-day mark to kick off her
reelection effort with a day full of campaign stops and politicking to get out
the vote.
“When people ask, is this a COVID election, my answer is yes, it
is,” she
explained at a campaign launch party
the day before the milestone. For all intents and purposes, the media
predicted an easy coast to reelection, fueled by the successful defeat of the
virus.
It happened on the 102nd day, and it took the world
by surprise. The festivities of the milestone
and the associated electoral campaign had yet to dissipate, but
COVID-19 was back in New Zealand. A family of four tested positive in
Auckland, triggering a panicked government plan to contain its spread.
Within 24 hours the country’s largest city was back under lockdown.
Police
checkpoints, internal
travel restrictions, police and military in the streets, arrests
for violating lockdowns, runs
on supermarkets, appeals to snitch on violators – a mad rush to contain the spread by any means necessary.
Government authorities still do not know how the virus made
it through the border fortress, but it breached the walls nonetheless. Then the
familiar, frantic pattern set in. The initial 3-day lockdown of Auckland became 12 days.
As the expiration date approached, Ardern
slapped on another emergency extension that will supposedly expire August
30.
[For now it did indeed exit on August 30.] But coronavirus has a
strange track record of converting previously habitable places into geographical oddities –
two weeks from everywhere.
Media outlets that celebrated the 100-day milestone suddenly found
themselves having to explain what went wrong, with little in the way of a
plausible story. Within less than 24 hours of
posting, NPR even hastily amended the aforementioned headline to account for
the change of circumstances: “In
New Zealand, Life Was Ordinary Again With No Virus Spread, But It Didn’t Last.”
The unexpected outbreak similarly upended Ardern’s
predicted coast to reelection, taking the centerpiece of her campaign message
with it. With
evidence of the containment policy’s effectiveness shattered but an ideological
resolve to double down and stay the course, the Prime Minister now comes
across as simultaneously panicked, enraged, and flustered.
Amid the self-imposed chaos of the Auckland lockdown and
mounting pressures from opposition parties, Ardern exercised her legal
prerogative as Prime Minister and pushed back the polling
date by a month. It remains to be seen how New Zealanders will react when
they go to the polls in mid-October, save to note that it will likely hinge on
the uncertainty of the renewed lockdowns and on the competing parties’
abilities to frame the latest outbreak to their advantage at the ballot box.
The current outbreak notwithstanding, it still remains true
that New Zealand has weathered the medical dimensions of the COVID-19 pandemic
better than most. The country currently stands at a little
over 1,700 cases and 22 fatalities – a tiny fraction of the
devastation seen in hotspots around the globe. But these medical statistics
conceal an unsettling reality about how Ardern’s government has weathered the
crisis.
Far from a paragon of science-guided policy, the New
Zealand approach hearkens back to the time of medieval plagues and associated
superstitions – of walling oneself off in a castellated abbey in the
countryside for the duration, of hoping, praying the crisis will pass by your
fortress as it ravages the outside world, and of inevitably letting one’s guard
down at a moment of frivolity and celebration.
And for a passing moment, such a strategy may nominally succeed – particularly if the fortress is isolated – as remote Pacific
islands tend to be – and if one is willing to accept isolationism backed by the recurring
and draconian enforcement measures to maintain it. But the
fortress approach to a pandemic is neither a sustainable strategy for New
Zealand nor an adaptable model for the rest of the world.
As the events of the last three weeks demonstrate, the
perceived victories of the Ardern government on its 100-day milestone were
fleeting, overturned in an instant by human error or even a chance occurrence
that somehow allowed the virus to slip through the gatehouse.
The Ardern government’s current low case count only conceals a much
greater and self-inflicted vulnerability that arises from the lockdown
strategy.
The policy of eliminating COVID-19 by shutting out the rest of the
world only “works” if one assumes that they can perfectly maintain the bubble
until somebody on the outside discovers a vaccine, or the virus dissipates
globally from external herd immunity.
But the medieval strategy of lockdown-imposed isolation is
inherently fragile – so fragile, in fact, that it can collapse into chaos at
any moment, precipitating a mad rush to regain the illusions of control over
the situation. If even the slightest thing goes wrong though – if somebody slips
through the border with an undetected case, if a bureaucratic administrator
makes a paperwork mistake, if a worker who came into contact
with an infected person in quarantine forgot to wash his or her hands, or untold
thousands of other similar scenarios play out – then the whole system of
isolation and containment collapses. It’s back to rolling
lockdowns, imposed without warning at any moment, and continuing in perpetuity.
Far from adopting this strategy as a model, the world must avoid
the corner of perpetual recurring lockdowns in which New Zealand now finds
itself. And New Zealand’s government would be
wise to drop the hubristic pretensions of commanding and controlling a virus
through medieval self-isolation, seeking instead an alternative strategy that
is robust to unexpected setbacks and equipped for long-run recovery.
