How It Started…How It’s Going (Part One)

So. Here I am, writing a post that is less than a month away from my last one! So instead of being the person who is constantly apologizing for not having written a new post sooner, will I become the person who introduces every post with a self-congratulatory statement about my impressive timeliness in posting? I really hope not, especially since a month between posts is still a pretty long time and is not all that impressive. But baby steps! In my defense, if I even need one, this post promises to be a doorstopper, so get ready. In fact, I just might end up splitting it into two. Two for the price of one, more bang for your buck, a double feature. Not just one update in under a month, but two? (Do I sound self-congratulatory yet?)

Yes, yes, I want to write some more straightforward travel posts, to talk about our time here in Northland, to share some of my thoughts on New Zealand’s more spectacular offerings. But it feels inappropriate–even disingenuous– to do that without first addressing the COVID situation, which is currently front and center here.

But lest you think this will be a post of COVID policy play-by-plays, I should say that this is really a story of how starry-eyed idealization can only ever end in at least some amount of disappointment, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s a story of disillusionment. And yes, it’s a story about travel. Because I am still just a traveler here in New Zealand, and I am somehow in the almost unfathomable position of being able to offer both an insider and an outsider perspective of what it’s like to be here right now. And also, this is totally going to be a two-parter. 

I have the impression, accurate or not, that much of the rest of the world has stopped paying attention to the pandemic unless it’s to condemn mask mandates or to stage protests or to spread conspiracy theories about global elites and the New World Order. Sure, I have friends and family who continue to take precautions, who, vaccinated or not, are for various reasons still concerned about their health and the health of those they love, but in terms of the overall mood, my sense is that an “ignorance is bliss” mindset and an intense desire to pretend that things are “normal” rules the day. Even as COVID cases rise (again) in many parts of the world, it seems that many countries have decided to press on with reopening plans and to unfurl their George W. style “Mission Accomplished” banner and declare the pandemic more or less over.

So I feel a little weird about writing this post, because if my New Zealand bubble really does make it hard for me to understand the world outside of it, then it may seem that I’m living in the past if I’m still writing about a virus that most people the world over are beyond fatigued of. Some of the international headlines about New Zealand’s current COVID response would certainly seem to support this suspicion. 

But that’s kind of the point—here in New Zealand, we haven’t ever really had to experience the pandemic. We sort of…skipped it. Or at least fast-forwarded through much of it. So the consequences of the recent Delta outbreak here feel brand spanking new to us, and we’ve only just started to have a taste of what the rest of the world has been dealing with for a year and change. And that means that for New Zealand, the pandemic is breaking news. In some ways, maybe we are living in the past. We’re no longer fast-forwarding. We’re playing catch up.

Back in June, New South Wales, in Australia, suffered a Delta outbreak. Up until that point, NSW, and Australia in general—apart from Melbourne, anyway—had done a pretty good job of handling the pandemic. But this time around, they weren’t so fortunate. It took them over a week to really respond to the outbreak, and by the time they did, the lockdown response wasn’t appropriately intense enough to deal with it. Takeaways were still allowed, people could seemingly still spend hours browsing certain Kmarts (I said in an earlier post that Australian and New Zealand Kmart are nothing like Kmart in the US—it’s the place to go for all of your cheap everyday needs) or hardware stores, and generally it seemed that there was an overconfidence that the measures they did implement (shutting down indoor dining, keeping certain kinds of businesses closed, relying on their “gold standard” contact tracing, which they’d been repeatedly praised for earlier the pandemic) would be enough.

As cases kept skyrocketing and it became clear that they’d lost control, they switched the focus to amping up their vaccination program and trying to get as many shots in arms as they could, as quickly as possible. Even so, NSW, particularly Sydney and the surrounding areas, spent weeks, then months, under increasingly restrictive lockdowns.

Here in New Zealand, I watched this all unfold with an ever-increasing sense of foreboding. “Watching Australia like *eyes emoji*,” I texted to some of my friends elsewhere in the world. We were still in Auckland, and it seemed like only a matter of time before the virus somehow popped up in New Zealand, and when it did, the idea that the country’s largest city would be ground zero seemed like a no brainer.

So we got the hell out of dodge, leaving Auckland on August 2nd. It should be said that our motivation to leave was not entirely COVID-inspired; we were genuinely excited to explore more of the country. Still, some of our friends here would later mostly-jokingly-but-maybe-not-entirely ask us if we knew something they didn’t. We headed up north to Northland, and two weeks and one day later, the first Delta case in New Zealand (not to mention the first COVID case in months) showed up in the community. 

That very same afternoon, the government announced a countrywide Level 4 lockdown. This was the first time that any area of the country, let alone the entire thing, had been in Level 4 since March/April 2020. Level 4 here is intense—the only thing open are pharmacies and supermarkets. No takeaways, no pizza delivery, no going to the office, no school, no playgrounds. People are expected to stay in their homes and to venture out only for exercise in their immediate area. 

Yes, it’s incredibly restrictive, but we’d only been at Level 4 once before, and only for a month. And it was because of that month-long lockdown that New Zealand was able to return to COVID-free, normal life by June 2020, while the rest of the world limped along with never-ending restrictions and daily case counts that seemed to defy mathematical reason. It seemed a small price to pay.

To the rest of the world, this apparently seemed extreme. International headlines, in which New Zealand had once held a place of highest honor, all but made fun of the swiftness and severity of the response, and editorials around the world offered “expert” opinions on how New Zealand needed to accept the reality of COVID and to abandon its pie-in-the-sky elimination strategy (never mind that it was this strategy that had earned New Zealand its sterling reputation in the first place). Once New Zealand had been the darling of the media, the shining star of the pandemic, the feted poster child for the power of strong leadership and community spirit, but now it was being treated like the embarrassingly overprotective mother of an asthmatic summer camper.

“New Zealand Locks Down Entire Country Over One COVID Case” was the theme of most of the international headlines. While the country may have been the envy of the world when images of packed rugby stadiums were splashed across front pages back in 2020, New Zealand was doing it all wrong now. Now, in a post-vaccine and an open-for-business-no-matter-what-we’re-moving-on world, the story seemed to be that the country was too reactive, too cautious, too willfully resistant to the new living-with-COVID game plan.

Newspaper articles quoted Kiwis living in the US as they ruefully lamented their home country’s behind-the-timesness and gushed about their trips to Disneyland. A friend of R’s left him a voice message:  “The news is saying that New Zealand locked down the whole country because of one case of COVID. Is that true?” The incredulity all but dripped from that last lilting syllable. 

For those here in New Zealand, this kind of reporting rankled, and it prompted all sorts of indignant and defensive responses from everyone from supermarket cashiers to editorial staffers. Twitter and Reddit and the comment sections of online mags and newspapers surged with messages attempting to refute this unflattering international narrative.

As people outside of New Zealand, who had once looked at this country with admiration, made all sorts of wild and unfounded claims about how destructive and unnecessary the COVID response here is and had been, people inside were boasting about our year and a half of freedom, a comparatively healthy economy, and our lack of illness, deaths, and hospitalizations. “You can fuck right off” seemed to embody the tenor of the attitude of most Kiwis as they addressed foreigners proffering their generally uninformed—and often downright misinformed—opinions. You don’t get it, Kiwis said. We aren’t like the rest of you. We’re different.

It seemed so obvious to people here—New Zealand wasn’t locking down because of one COVID case. We were locking down because COVID didn’t exist in New Zealand, so it had to come from somewhere. If there was one case, there had to be more out there. And we needed to stamp it out, just like we did the first time round, so that we could all get back to partying like it was 2019. You know—no masks, no rules, and most importantly, no virus. And so, in August of 2021, well over a year since those lazy-hazy-crazy days of our first lockdown, we found ourselves doing the time warp again, and everyone geared up to do their part.

At first, it even felt a little exciting. Don’t get me wrong, no one was feeling stoked about a Level 4 lockdown, but that same sense of community spirit from early on in the pandemic seemed to return with full force. The “team of five million” was back, and it was better than ever. We’d done this before, and damn it, we could do it again. The fact that the rest of the world seemed to be watching us with a mixture of schadenfreude and disapproval only further fueled Kiwi resolve. Somehow, when we weren’t paying attention, New Zealand had become the underdog instead of the top dog, and we were going to prove the haters wrong.

“Kia kaha,” businesses posted on their websites and Facebook pages. “Be kind,” read government posters and social media messaging. People flocked to IMDB to leave reviews for the “must-watch season 3” of the COVID-19 1 p.m. Daily Update (check it out if you’re so inclined!). We had a record of success and a plucky attitude. We were ready. We had this. Hit us with your best shot, Delta. 

And at first, it seemed we did have it. People stayed home, stayed local, were extra polite in the line at the supermarket, and generally seemed to have a pretty optimistic outlook. This wasn’t our first rodeo. As long as we stayed the course, we’d be back to our regularly-scheduled beforetimes lives before we knew it. 

When COVID-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins misspoke at one of the daily pressers (“It is a challenge for people in high density areas to get outside and spread their legs when they are surrounded by other people,” he said), the gaffe provided fodder for countless memes and in-jokes. “I’m sure you’ll all have fun with me later,” he said after his slip of the tongue, and that was an understatement.

“Spread your legs” had its own hashtag on Twitter and trended for days. People took photos of themselves outdoors, legs open to a V in the air, and posted them on social media, accompanied by captions that stated that they were only following their government’s direction. The government released a new poster: “Spread your legs, not the virus,” it read. Just hours after the presser, themed merchandise featuring his words appeared in online stores. Chris Hipkins himself, days later, appeared at another presser sipping from a mug emblazoned with his cartoon image and the inadvertent slogan he’d coined.

I realize that as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been using a whole lot of words like “we” and “us” and “our.” Though as I’ve said in a previous post, I am not a Kiwi, and I imagine that many New Zealanders might take issue with my liberal use of the first person pronoun, it’s surprisingly easy to fancy myself part of the team of five million, particularly when the chips are down and it’s all hands on deck. In fact, it’s a testament to how skillfully the government, and especially the prime minister, communicated the “we’re all in this together” message. 

But as I watched the country’s response to Hipkins’s gaffe, I felt a renewed sense of my outsider status. Because as amusing as it was to watch, as many times as I giggled at a new meme, I felt hyper-aware of how impossible, how inconceivable, such a thing would be in the US. I cannot even begin to imagine a scenario where a US politician would be the catalyst for, and the object of, such light-hearted, innocent fun and teasing on a country-wide level. Things in the US are so often mean-spirited, toxic. Gaffes are more often fodder for derision and division, not community uplift.

The initial lockdown announcement declared that Auckland and the Coromandel would be at Level 4 for seven days, while the rest of New Zealand would be there for three. Most people expected that this would be extended, and it was. But morale was still high. Faith in elimination was still strong.

On my daily Paihia-Opua walks, I encountered seemingly relentlessly cheery masked walkers. “Enjoying your walk?” masked elderly gents would inquire, standing aside on the path to let me pass. When I responded in the affirmative, I’d more often than not be met with a hearty “good on ya.” I lurked on the New Zealand subreddit’s daily presser threads and felt buoyed by the feel-good, high-vibe atmosphere. Media reports and public sentiment polls found that support for the response remained high. The daily pressers seemed as informative and coolly competent—and confident—as ever.

All of this good-vibes-only energy and can-do spirit seemed to be doing its job. The number of new cases started to decline. Cases were contained in Auckland. By the end of August, New Zealand, apart from the Auckland and Northland regions, shifted down to Level 3. Northland joined Level 3 only a few days later, and on September 7th, the country (again, except for Auckland) went down to Level 2. Level 2 is basically normal life, with some capacity caps on certain events, as well as the requirement that businesses have the ability to space customers and patrons 1 meter apart. Level 2 in the time of Delta also included something new:  a mask requirement for essential businesses, with strong encouragement to wear them in most indoor settings.

We were almost to Level 1 again (this is where it’s just like 2019, but with the borders shut, and where we’d spent most of the past year and a half). Things were moving in the right direction. Elimination, here we came (again). The future looked so bright, we had to wear shades.

For those of you who may be wondering about the role that vaccination was playing in all of this, I suppose I should provide a bit of context. While people in other parts of the world had seen their vaccination programs start early in 2021, New Zealand lagged behind. The idea was that since there was no COVID here, there was no real need to rush the rollout. I’m sure there are many other factors involved here that I’m unaware of, as well as some I’m not privy to, but that’s my general understanding of a large part of it.

Border and frontline workers, the immunocompromised, and people 65 and over were the first to get the vaccine. It wasn’t until the end of July that other New Zealanders became eligible, and even then it was structured as a phased rollout, with certain age bands becoming eligible at various points post July. Given the August outbreak, there has been a fair amount of criticism for this decision, because it meant that only a very small percent of the population was vaccinated at the time of Delta’s arrival, and that was part of why such a strong lockdown response was warranted. This feels really boring to write about, much less read about, but I did want to provide a little bit of backstory so that people weren’t left puzzled. I’ll have more interesting things to say about the vaccination program in Part Two of this post (no, for real!).

Anyway, back to the main thread. Though I obviously can’t speak for all New Zealanders, the mood online and on the street seemed almost smug. We weren’t like neighboring Australia, who didn’t have the fortitude or the wisdom to lock down hard and early and had paid a hefty price for this failing. Nope, we’d made the hard choice, we’d made the tough sacrifices, and we were reaping the benefits. All those naysayers who believed that New Zealand was chasing the impossible elimination dream, that we couldn’t do it again? We were showing them. As time passed and cases and alert levels went down, as we had days of single-digit case numbers, it seemed like a pat on the back and a job-well-done congratulatory drink was all but guaranteed. See? New Zealand was different. It could do what other countries couldn’t—or wouldn’t.

But then the numbers started to creep back up. 2020’s Sexiest Man, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, stated that most were “household contacts” of existing cases, which superficially seemed reassuring, but as case numbers kept ballooning (to give you some perspective, “ballooning” in New Zealand equates to high double-digit or triple-digit cases in a day, though to date that triple-digit number has yet to crack 200 more than a handful of times), people began to question what kinds of households could possibly contain so many contacts.

Rumors started to swirl that the cases were coming from gangs and emergency housing units. That people were breaking the rules and weren’t taking one for the team like they were supposed to. Things seemed to be going in the wrong direction, and people started to question if we had been premature in thinking that victory was within our grasp. Doubt began to set in. What if maybe New Zealand weren’t so different after all?

I don’t actually know if this is the best place to conclude Part One, but as this is getting pretty damn long, I’m making the decision to stop here. This is hardly what I’d call a cliffhanger ending, and if you’re sitting here asking where that story of not-so-far-as-disillusionment is, it’s coming, and if you think you know where this story is heading, I think you might be surprised, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, maybe I am going to pat myself on the back for posting this, because as excited as I was to start writing again coming off of my last post, after the high of feeling focused and energized and creative wore off, that same old fear that I can’t write anymore came rushing right back in, and it felt like I was entering into the same old cycle:  I want to write, I fear I can’t write, I procrastinate, I feel dull and sluggish, I don’t write. But I didn’t give into it this time. Whether this post is good or bad or somewhere in between, I sat down and I did the work. Not to mention I’ve sort of set it up so that I’m on the hook for the next post within the next few days. And though it may seem small, that’s all something to celebrate, as far as I’m concerned, so maybe forgive me this self-indulgent ending. Catch you on the flip side.