Heather du Plessis-Allan: We must quarantine all arrivals

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's Government has ordered a four-week lockdown. Photo / File

Opinion

Kiwis who still have jobs and who're locked down in warm, dry, comfortable houses can be forgiven for perhaps not understanding the full damage this lockdown is doing to our country.

That's not a criticism of the Government's decision to order this lockdown. It was the right thing to do. Once the Government essentially closed the borders to international visitors to keep Covid-19 out, there was no choice but to inevitably try to then stamp it out too by ordering a lockdown.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.

There are families this weekend who are cramped in houses too small for the number of people in them. There are people living in garages. There are women essentially locked away with their abusers, and for 90 minutes on our first night in lockdown the only calls police took were domestic abuse calls.

There are business owners who've probably already given up mentally on their businesses, and there are business owners trying desperately to save businesses they know in their hearts won't survive four weeks, let alone any extra weeks in lockdown.

There are people who have already lost their jobs and people who will still lose their jobs in the coming weeks.

The social and economic cost to this country is higher than any of us can possibly imagine on day four. Which is why the Government needs to keep this lockdown as short as it possibly can.

To do that, it must stop the arrival of coronavirus into this country from overseas. As many as 50 infected people are arriving here each day. That's according to Dr David Skegg, who reckons we're trying to empty a bath with a jug while the tap's still running. The tap is the flow of infected arrivals from overseas.

Every day that arrivals keep bringing it in is potentially another delay in lifting the lockdown. It's heartening that the Government is now quarantining arrivals who are sick or who have no satisfactory plans to self-isolate. But that's simply not enough.

Not everyone carrying the virus on arrival looks sick on arrival. We're hearing stories of people only feeling sick 11 days after arriving in New Zealand. Not everyone promising to self-isolate will self-isolate. How many stories have we heard of tourists taking scenic helicopter flights and posting letters when they should be in isolation?

Over the Tasman, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has ordered a compulsory 14-day quarantine for absolutely everyone arriving there. We need to do this too.

If the numbers of arrivals at the start of the week were too many to quarantine - and that's not necessarily a certainty - they are surely by now dwindling to a point where they can be quarantined somewhere under supervision.

And if we really do want to keep this lockdown short, we might need more than just a gentle reminder of the rules. The reports of people ignoring instructions and mixing with other households is infuriating to those trying to do the right thing. If some of us still haven't figured this out by day four, we might need police to step up their presence and give us all a bit of a fright.

As I said on Newstalk ZB Drive earlier this week, people seem to be treating this like a holiday. If you still have pay coming in and a nice house, it might feel like a holiday. It isn't one. And for some people these are four weeks of punishment. They don't need us to drag this out. Let's go hard and get this over with for them.