This move will greatly reduce the stress on the quarantine system (MIQ) that returnees from other parts of the world still need to go through. There is currently a massive under supply of quarantine hotel slots compared to demand, with slots being snapped up within minutes of being released.
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!).
Additionally, the MIQ system enables an unlimited number of bookings to be made with a SINGLE email address.
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.
Have you tried making multiple bookings in the same account or multiple emails since Feb? They seem to have a job that checks for duplicate bookings (based on email and/or names/passports) and emails you to warn you if you don’t remove the excess bookings they will cancel all of them. Don’t actually know if they follow through with it...
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.
Interesting. I didn't attempt holding actual booking for longer than an hour, because I didn't want to take spots away from people.
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.
Yes you are right, it won’t mean free beds in hotels. But will mean greater chance of those desperate to return home being able to. They have a fighting chance now of getting a MIQ slot.
It sounds like most of the MIQ slots will not be released. (But apparently MIQ demand is dropping, perhaps because we're heading into winter, and/or because vaccination is going well in some countries.)
People in Oz with slots already won’t release them until they know for sure they won’t need them. Bet you will see a flurry of releases the day before the flight (or they’ll just hold them until they are in NZ). But hopefully new booking demand will be reduced by this.
As a NZer in the UK who has had shot 1 for my vaccination, I just hope this is the beginning of a way for people like us to come back without dealing with MIQ.
The chances of an outbreak being seeded via Australia seem to be very low ... much lower than the chances of the virus breaking out of MIQ. So I don't think it's too soon, in fact I think we should have done this months ago.
I'm sorry to hear about your father, but that doesn't change the facts of NZ's situation.
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.
You also have no natural immunity. NZ did well but it must stay isolated until everyone has been vaccinated, because the population has effectively never seen COVID yet and therefore are where the rest of the world was more than a year ago.
FWIW, Australia had 23 local cases in the last month (an outbreak which resulted in a major city going into a snap lockdown).
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.
I'd personally be in favor of some sort of travel bubble within the pacific with other countries who share our low/zero local transmission (or at least to have a more lightweight quarantine process involved).
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.
"Natural immunity" has been of little value at the country level. Whenever/wherever people have proclaimed that "natural immunity" is stemming the pandemic (e.g. Sweden last year, India this year) a new wave has proven them wrong.
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...
There is no reason to believe a mutation is going to render major vaccines useless. The real-life results of the mRNA vaccines against the major variants are very encouraging (see e.g. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pfizer-says-trials-sugg...). Many of the scary lab results were only testing the virus against antibodies, not the full power of a vaccinated person's immune system.
I'm not saying the vaccines aren't effective against the current variants of concern, but the situation with part of the population vaccinated and mass transmission in the unvaccinated part of the population may favor the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant strain.
Which part of the world has "natural immunity" to Covid? The fraction of people who had Covid compared to those who had not is almost negligible almost everywhere?
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.
> "Which part of the world has "natural immunity" to Covid? The fraction of people who had Covid compared to those who had not is almost negligible almost everywhere?"
It's been reported that more than half of the UK population now has Covid antibodies, either through recent infection or through vaccination:
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.
covid19-projections.com (which has generally been quite good) estimates that ~a third of the US population has been infected with COVID. In South Dakota, which didn't institute any real restrictions, they estimate the number is close to ~50% [1].
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].
> Which part of the world has "natural immunity" to Covid?
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.
Purely annecdotal, however in my country it's double digit %, but I'd imagine the actual immunity is much higher because:
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%.
This is mostly interesting because NZ has explicitly pursued a strategy of COVID elimination, while Australia has followed a suppression strategy. While recently the effects have been broadly similar (small outbreaks generally quickly contained and stamped out using short regional lockdowns and contact tracing), it's fair to say that a lot of people here in NZ are uncomfortable with this.
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 Australian federal government has been aiming for a suppression strategy while the states have been eliminating the virus any time it appears anyway. We’ve had a few minor outbreaks over the last 6 months, just like NZ - and each one has been eliminated down to 0 cases again. Just like NZ. Practically speaking our policies are pretty much the same. And if either country has covid start spreading, I’m sure the international border will close again just like our interstate borders.
Not quite. The federal government is responsible for primary care (i.e. seeing your GP through Medicare, Pharmaceuticals through the PBS) and aged care. States are responsible for Hospitals
In the state of Victoria, nearly seven million people were locked down hard for 112 days last year, going from a peak of 6768 active cases to zero. That ain’t suppression.
My take on it is that the government may think that under an elimination strategy any community transmission events would be perceived as failures.
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.
All Australian states other than New South Wales have adopted an elimination strategy as well. Here in Western Australia, we recently had a 5 day lockdown due to a single case of community transmission.
You've heard wrong. I went to a conference in Queenstown a month ago and the first person that spoke was involved in tourism operations there. The situation was bleak.
Something 90% of tourism of NZ is domestic, so we don't really need more tourists that much.
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.
Skilled migrant visa is turning into accredited employer visa. Many of my friends who live here are stuck with draconian employers and with salaries they make there's absolutely 0 sight to buy a house.
> 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.
About time, given that almost a million kiwis live in Australia. The labour government, which has failed on every important measure (such as housing, child poverty, mental health, vaccination rollout, public transport, transparency etc.) has been unfairly resistant to it and they are only doing it because of opposition pressure.
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
How so? Covid still exists and there most likely are many undetected cases. Don't buy the marketing propaganda from politicians who have an implied interest in propagating such idioms.
> such as housing, child poverty, mental health, vaccination rollout, public transport, transparency etc.
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).
It really is not possible to discuss legitimate failures of this labour government without one of you "9 long years" losers showing up. Give it a rest, it's been 4 long years already.
If you had actually read my comment, you would have seen that I wrote every previous government in the past few decades, and also that I'm also critical of our current government.
It is far too early to declare vaccination rollout a failure. Housing too ... the new policies are, politically speaking, very bold and we'll have to wait a while to see how much effect they have.
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!).