Derek Cheng: Social calendar turned upside down? Suck it up. It's better than dying

What lockdown looks like: the nearly-deserted Bourbon St in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Photo / AP

COMMENT:

So here we are. The borders are closed and your world has been turned upside down.

Gone is the wedding planned for the weekend, the overseas holiday to Sri Lanka, the crawling between pubs or screaming at the referee from the stands in the Cake Tin.

Some of us had even planned to be jobless and van-lifing around some sun-swept European coast, consuming as much cheese as possible.

It's all very inconvenient.

But it should be pretty easy to swallow because it's much better than people dying. Covid-19 has now ripped through communities in 168 countries, infecting more than 200,000 and killing 8000.

Shutting the borders, cancelling social gatherings and keeping your distance are all aimed at putting the brakes on the rising death toll, or in New Zealand's case at the moment, preventing any deaths at all.

The importance of being ahead of the curve is underlined by how exponential the spread of the virus has been - and so, too, has been the response here.

It seems an age ago when the borders were shut to China, then Iran, but it was only last month. Then those coming in from Italy and South Korea had to quarantine themselves.

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It was only six days ago that the prospect of shutting the borders seemed ludicrous, but as Covid-19 cases ballooned through Europe and North America, New Zealand went from fairly modest travel restrictions to quarantining almost all overseas arrivals.

Now we have closed borders, and public health messages have escalated from coughing into your elbow to keeping two metres between you and anyone else.

"Ludicrous" has been overtaken by adjectives such as "historic", "extraordinary", "unprecedented" - none of which are understatements.

In a nod to the worst-case scenarios being considered behind closed doors, the Prime Minister never scoffed at any suggestion of shutting the borders, even well before a global pandemic was formally announced.

Some will view it as being too bold, but the obvious question is whether the border shutdown should have happened when the self-isolation requirements were announced.

Those measures were effectively a border closure, Jacinda Ardern said at the time, but it seems naive to think the 20,000-odd visitors who fly into New Zealand everyday would all play happy quarantined campers.

Enforcement was always going to be impossible. Ardern practically conceded as much when she said the border controls had not been good enough, triggering the border closure.

Now it's all hands on deck to stop widespread community transmission, which means cancelling that wedding or overseas trip.

But as you adjust to the new Covid-19 normal, keep in mind other areas around the world have it much worse.

There are ghost towns of empty streets in Spain, where police and army officers are stationed at intersections to ensure people are travelling alone and for approved reasons. California has issued an official "stay at home" order.

If Covid-19 starts spreading through a community, lockdown will come: a blanket ban on all social gatherings, regardless of numbers; businesses, bars and restaurants, schools and universities all closed; restrictions on all travel.

Only essentials services would run including supermarkets, public transport, gas stations, airports, prisons, the postal service.

It would be more inconvenient, but still much more preferable to death.