28 October 2021. Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins announces changes to MIQ, with stays halving from 14 to seven days, followed by isolation at home for three days. Video / Pool
Greg Scott is good at pivoting. In February 2020 he returned from a trip to Asia with a grim understanding. The comfortable stream of business and leisure travellers to his two Auckland hotel properties was about to dry up.
Within days of his return the owner of the Quest HendersonApartment Hotel and the Quest on Eden Apartment Hotel (part of the Quest franchise) had a new booking system "istay" up and running, aimed at self-isolating new arrivals to New Zealand. Concurrently, he called on his contacts at the Ministry of Social Development to offer more of his self-contained units for emergency housing. He sailed through lockdown fully booked.
Scott is now itching to pivot again. Last month he sent a plan to the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment (MBIE) proposing his properties be used to self-isolate returnees outside the department's swamped Managed Isolation and Quarantine system (MIQ). He also sent it to Government Ministers. Scott can offer 80 rooms across his two properties and, because the units are self-contained, he says he can manage low-risk arrivals (fully vaccinated travellers with negative pre-departure tests from low-risk countries) with little chance of seeding new cases of the virus into the community.
Scott's plan imagines a four-day system of isolation, with no scope for travellers to leave their full kitchen and laundry-equipped apartments for that period. Food and Covid-testing would be delivered. He says he's had many of the systems required - security, ventilation, cleaning protocols - in place for over a year.
"We're looking ahead now to a time when we move back to more normal travel, and in the meantime we're thinking about the transition ... and quite simply, how we can get business moving and thousands more Kiwis home," he says.
His idea, or at least its general thrust toward loosening the bottleneck of MIQ, becomes more compelling by the day, as Covid cases rise steadily in the community, and the percentage of the total population that's fully vaccinated pushes close to 70 per cent. What's not clear is the readiness of politicians and officials to make further system changes quickly in the face of rapidly changing circumstances.
In recent days the Government has halved the required stay in MIQ from 14 days to seven. Mandatory isolation is now followed by self-isolation at home or elsewhere for a further three days, effectively; the isolation requirement does not lift until a day-nine Covid test is returned and negative.
However, despite that reduction in the length of stay, the change has not yet afforded significantly higher capacity for returnees.
The Quest Henderson Apartment Hotel in Auckland. Photo / Supplied
On Monday, MBIE declined to supply the number of international travellers whose return it expects to accommodate in the coming weeks. It confirmed that the number of rooms available to them is lower than it was three months ago, when room capacity stood at some 4000 per fortnight.
"The change to a seven-day stay will allow us to make more rooms available for international arrivals, though not substantially initially. We are hoping we can at least reinstate the level of rooms we had available for international returnees prior to the community outbreak in mid-August," Joint Head of Managed Isolation and Quarantine, Brigadier Rose King, said on Monday.
There are also two concurrent pilot plans running that dispense with MIQ facilities for travellers. The first was devised by the Government and is limited to 150 business travellers, leaving and returning to New Zealand before Christmas. The second is Sir Ian Taylor's trial of a "business devised" private self-isolation system. Both plans are aimed at pointing a way forward for travellers to use private self-isolation.
Scott's proposal is similar, though more brief. His "isolation stay" plan would last only four days, the period in which travellers are most likely to test positive. Following a day-three negative test, Scott proposes, travellers should be allowed to fully self-isolate.
On background, several parties with knowledge of MBIE officials' thinking on alternatives to MIQ say Scott's specific plan is unlikely to find favour; but a general head of pressure for change is clearly building.
There remain conservative voices, including those of modellers at Te Punaha Matatini, who warn that raising significantly the number of international travellers is an important risk factor in the spread of Covid.
But in recent months the public narrative around protecting New Zealand's border has shifted enormously. Both the National and Act parties favour systems of self-isolation. And even public health specialists at the University of Otago, including epidemiologist Michael Baker, have described the system of managed isolation for Covid-negative, vaccinated travellers as "inconsistent and arbitrary" in light of the hundreds of Covid-positive cases in the community who are self-isolating.
New Zealand is no longer "defending" against Covid in the ways that it did when it had an elimination strategy and the border is no longer the front line.
