Covid 19 coronavirus Delta Omicron variant: Twenty-two months of MIQ border hardship

National Party Covid-19 spokesman Chris Bishop calls it a "lottery of human misery"; his cross bench colleague, Act's David Seymour, says it "verges on a form of torture". But managed isolation and quarantine has also largely stood between New Zealand and the massive - and deadly - outbreaks of Covid-19 beyond our borders. As MIQ remains in the spotlight, despite now nearing its terrible twos, Cherie Howie takes a look back.

In the beginning, when it became apparent New Zealand was at risk of a flood of infection from a new virus rapidly spreading around the world, and before the massive state-run apparatus that's provided - for most - safe entry into New Zealand for 215,000 people and counting, those arriving at our ports and airports were told to isolate at home.

While almost 100 New Zealand citizens and permanent residents evacuated from virus epicentre Wuhan, China, went into campervans in a makeshift quarantine facility at an Auckland navy base in early February 2020, by March 1 those arriving from new Covid-19 hotspots, such as northern Italy and South Korea, were being told to self isolate.

Almost 100 New Zealanders evacuated from Wuhan went into a makeshift quarantine facility on Whangaparaoa in March 2020. Photo / Chris Tarpey

Two weeks later, as New Zealand's sixth case of the virus was confirmed, that directive was extended to all arrivals from any country, except Pacific island nations.

Most complied; those who didn't found themselves in unwanted headlines - among them rule-breaking tourists flown straight to waiting police by their incensed Fox Glacier helicopter pilot.

At least two people were deported for ignoring the directive.

There would, however, be scant time for errant visitors to land in hot water with authorities - four days after overseas arrivals were told to self-isolate the Government closed the country's borders to those who weren't New Zealand citizens or permanent residents.

There have been a number of attempted and successful escapes over the past 22 months. Photo / Dean Purcell

Six days after that scenic flights were most definitely canned, along with everything bar supermarket visits, medical care and essential work, as the country began a four-week lockdown.

Arrivals continued, as Kiwis overseas dashed home - ravaged flight schedules allowing - amid the global crisis.

Then-National Party leader Simon Bridges started a petition calling for blanket quarantine at the border and, on April 9, the Government responded.

Forty thousand people had arrived in the past 20 days, more than "all of the hotel rooms across the country that we could have properly housed people in", Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, as she announced all arrivals would now be required to go into managed quarantine for 14 days.

"No one goes home, everyone goes into a managed facility," she said of the policy.

It had no end date attached.

A cluster of close calls

The role of managed isolation and quarantine took on even more importance after the country reached its prized elimination goal in mid-2020, enjoying 102 days with no recorded community transmission before four cases infected with an overseas strain, but no known - or subsequently identified - link to the border, were discovered in Auckland on August 11.

Springtime scares, however, would reveal links to MIQ.

In late September a man tested positive after developing Covid-19 symptoms five days after being released from Christchurch's Crowne Plaza Hotel. Three others on a charter flight with the man also tested positive after completing managed isolation.

The lid of a communal rubbish bin was initially blamed before investigations found the virus instead appeared to have passed through particles suspended in the air - within just 50 seconds - during routine swabbing.

Just over a month later two staff members at Christchurch's Sudima MIQ were infected after a major outbreak among international fishing crew members.

It would later be determined the mariners sharing rooms and walking through corridors up to four times an hour to smoke outside was to blame, sparking changes to how large groups were managed in MIQ.

Auckland had an even dicier brush with a potential outbreak a week into November, when a Defence Force worker at Jet Park quarantine facility became infected, spreading the virus to a handful of others, including a city student he didn't know.

Capacity issues at the facilities were also beginning to catch some travelling or returning Kiwis out, with rooms almost completely booked until Christmas, locking out some planning trips home to see loved ones.

The arrival of the variants

The turn of the calendar to a new year brought no respite from the threat of fresh outbreaks, with overseas arrivals from almost all countries required to provide a negative Covid-19 test result before travelling to New Zealand, amid fears over the new, more infectious UK and South Africa variants.

The Pullman Hotel was the first casualty of one of the new variants after a busy recently-released returnee sparked a region-wide health scare in Northland, visiting 32 locations over nine days before discovering she was infected with the South African variant.

The source was later determined to be someone staying across the corridor from the woman as she neared the end of her managed isolation.

Blanket testing of hundreds of other recently released Pullman Hotel returnees revealed a father and his toddler were also infected, spreading the virus to their wife and mother, while a former Pullman guest isolating at home in Hamilton also tested positive.

And the mother of a teen who tested positive a day before she was due to leave the Pullman told Stuff her daughter described seeing fellow returnees mingling in halls, playing basketball and kids running around together "not really social distancing much".

"These facilities are there for a reason," Candice Botha said.

"You're supposed to be isolating away from people."

The Pullman Hotel MIQ in central Auckland was connected to a number of concerning Covid-19 leaks in January last year. File photo / Alex Robertson

The Pullman situation was described as "alarming" by Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins, and some of those still in isolation at the facility were forced to stay longer than planned - including in their rooms until after their day 12 test results - and self isolate at home for five days before the hotel was emptied for cleaning and improvements to ventilation.

Also on the way out in January last year was a managed isolation staffer at Auckland's Grand Millennium, sacked after slipping hand-written notes into a guest's groceries and scribbling his number onto a face mask.

A 20-minute forbidden rendezvous, interrupted by the hotel's security manager, followed after the staffer delivered a bottle of wine the guest ordered to her room.

The staffer was sacked and both given formal police warnings for the breach.

Others landed in trouble after escaping or attempting to escape.

At least nine failed and successful attempts have been recorded in the past 22 months. The most alarming was that of a man - who later tested positive for Covid-19 - strolling through a wind-blown gap in a fence at alert level 1 Auckland's Stamford Plaza MIQ before spending 70 minutes at large, including popping into a busy city centre supermarket.

Another escapee cut through a fence at Hamilton's Distinction Hotel and went to a liquor store, while a mother and her four teenage kids broke a window and scaled a fence at the same MIQ while awaiting an exemption to attend a funeral.

Wiggle rooms

By the new year, stories of inhumanity in the system were emerging.

Terminally ill expat Trevor Ponting was told he didn't qualify for an emergency spot in MIQ, around the same time The Wiggles were given spots.

The anomaly became something of a political hot potato, after National's Bridges had asked for "wiggle room for The Wiggles" when space initially wasn't available for the group, and Ardern was also asked about a possible solution to get the perpetually popular kids' entertainers across the border.

Ponting, meanwhile, was given an emergency MIQ spot after his family went public, his sister Yvonne telling media her brother's dying wish was to be with his mum.

"He has said to us, 'I just want to be with my mum'."

Terminally ill expat Trevor Ponting, pictured with his kids Mia and Toa, was initially turned down for an emergency MIQ spot last year. Photo / Supplied

The dad-of-two died in April, two weeks after the Government announced it would loosen rules for securing emergency spots and increase emergency slots by 100 a fortnight.

Meanwhile, an MIQ security guard's positive Covid-19 test in April revealed failings in the testing system.

The guard was supposed to be tested fortnightly. Instead, it'd been five months since his last test.

Beyond the border, demand for MIQ spaces remained intense - as of March last year reservations were needed up to four months in advance and the system's booking tool was clocking about 100 complaints a week.

An MIQ room release for June and July spaces saw the website crash under the pressure of a million hits, with some tech-savvy Kiwis using a computer programming code to snap up available spots in seconds.

Others tapped the gig economy to outsource thrashing the refresh button for cancelled bookings, or toiled hours each day themselves.

Kiwi Jonathan Brewer revealed the brutal reality of the "MIQ slot machine" in a video posted to Twitter.

"What's it like applying for quarantine in New Zealand? I made a video of 100 attempts to secure a spot. Almost got there once."

What's it like applying for quarantine in New Zealand? I made a video of 100 attempts to secure a spot. Almost got there once. pic.twitter.com/vPlnZzTSoS

— Jonathan Brewer 🇳🇿 (@kiwibrew) July 9, 2021

False dawn

The transtasman bubble, allowing quarantine-free return travel between New Zealand and Australia from April 19, had brought fresh hope for separated families as the pandemic entered its second year.

It would last, with interruptions, just over three months.

Pressure to find spaces for skilled and critical workers saw 500 spaces a fortnight allocated for the 10 months from May 2021, but some needed workers still found themselves shut out.

A letter from his district health board chief executive initially wasn't enough for Dr Jim Faherty to be given an emergency MIQ slot, threatening capacity at Southland Hospital's maternity unit because its clinical director was stranded in the US.

Faherty, who left New Zealand to visit his dying father, was eventually given a spot after going public when his two emergency MIQ applications, and an appeal, were rejected.

Legal action got Kiwi Bergen Graham, pictured with her husband Oscar Acevedo, an MIQ spot last year after several attempts to get an emergency spot failed. Photo / Supplied

And six applications online for an MIQ spot, and three complaints, weren't enough to get Kiwi Bergen Graham a place, despite her high-risk pregnancy and being stranded with her El Salvadorian husband in Los Angeles - their stopover destination for the journey to New Zealand.

"If I can't go back to New Zealand, then who can?" Graham said, before being given an MIQ voucher within 24 hours of launching legal action against the Health Minister and Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.

MIQ had become a business group within MBIE in July 2020, and is currently jointly led by the ministry's Chris Bunny and Royal New Zealand Navy Commodore Melissa Ross.

By September, a month into last year's Delta outbreak, domestic community cases were taking up spaces previously available to overseas arrivals.

Hipkins had confirmed at the start of the month the pause on MIQ bookings would continue, with some businesses so desperate to reopen overseas trade they were putting staff on flights without MIQ spots booked.

Two of the four sales staff he sent to Europe over winter had made it home, hydrofoil bike-maker Manta5's chief executive Mark Robothom said in October.

"The cost of doing nothing is too high. If we want to protect the 30-odd staff we've got, we've got to get some sales and some momentum going."

Hope, then heartbreak

Three months on, the challenge for travelling Kiwis is unchanged.

A virtual lobby MIQ allocation system introduced by Hipkins in September last year had 27,000 people sorted randomly into a queue for 3000 rooms.

Later releases proved similarly crowded, and on October 8 advocacy group Grounded Kiwis went to the High Court at Wellington seeking an urgent judicial review of MIQ, alleging Hipkins, Health Minister Andrew Little and MBIE chief executive Carolyn Tremain broke the law with how it was set up and run.

The bid to get a court order stopping the Government continuing to operate MIQ will be heard next monthEager travellers and returnees were given some hope in late November, when Hipkins announced fully vaccinated citizens and residents would be able to skip MIQ from January 17, if coming from Australia, and February 14, from all countries.

Some lucky lobby winners cancelled their MIQ rooms, as others packed up their overseas lives and booked flights home.

One virtual lobby room release ended with 500 spaces unfilled.

Their joy was to be short-lived - the march of the highly infectious variant Omicron beyond New Zealand borders prompted Hipkins to put phased reopening plans on ice until at least late next month.

Another blow came Tuesday night when MBIE suddenly cancelled its planned Thursday MIQ room release - earning scorn for doing so via tweet - due to an "unprecedented" number of Omicron cases at the border, risking the Government's strategy to minimise the risk of the variant getting into the community before booster shots and the newly-rolled out kids' doses are up.

Along with the Black Caps - the national men's cricket team were forced to postpone their tour of Australia days out from departure because of uncertainty on how they could
return - Kiwis stranded around the world shared in the latest border disappointment.

Desperate expat Ally Fabish has sold her house and quit her job.

She even faced sleeping in her car before a friend took her in, she said from Scotland.

"The only thing that's going to fix my mental health is my family ... I don't know how I'm going to get home."