How Aotearoa eliminated COVID—and how you can too.

I went out for dinner in Auckland last night, in no small part because we could.

A year ago, this would have been totally unremarkable. This time last year, the thought of me and the lovely and talented Mrs McCabe getting together with two of our best friends for a nice pre-Christmas feed would have been lovely, but not quite as noteworthy as last night’s supper was. Last night, we went out for dinner because, here in Aotearoa New Zealand, we can.

We have COVID in New Zealand. We have, as I write, this lovely and sunny Sunday morning, 59 cases of COVID in New Zealand (that link will take you to the Ministry of Health/Manatū Hauora website, where there’s a pleasing amount of transparency about what’s going on here, unlike other places I’ve called home). We just don’t have COVID running wild in New Zealand.

Life, in fact, has almost entirely returned to normal here. We remain, as Dr. Ashley Bloomfield, perhaps the most trusted man in the country right now, has said, at Level One, not Level None—our alert-level framework has remained largely unchanged since it was announced by our prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, back in March—but this simply means that businesses are required to display QR codes and we’re encouraged to scan them. Oh, and masks are required on public transport. That’s it. That’s the extent to which our lives are currently disrupted here.

We’re also, if we’re being thorough here, not open to the rest of the world yet. Only Kiwis—we’re defining this word slightly loosely; NZ citizens and permanent residents both qualify—are allowed in right now. There are certain exceptions, including entirely too many cricket players, or rugby teams that want to lose to the All Blacks, but, broadly speaking, the country is closed. And even if you can come in, you’ll spend a fortnight in managed isolation. But for most of us, life is essentially back to normal.

So how did we do it? The answer is quite, quite simple. We trusted our leaders, who in turn trusted the scientists. And our leaders took very clear steps. Our alert-levels framework was announced on 21st March, and we went into lockdown four days later. (For a really clear timeline of COVID in New Zealand, click here; it’s where I’m getting my dates and numbers from.)

Lockdown. Full lockdown. Actual, no-fannying-around, for-real lockdown. Across-the-country lockdown. Almost everything closed. I walked my dog down the high street in our small Auckland town that day, and I saw nobody. Nobody. There were no cars parked on a road I’ve sometimes had to drive up and down half a dozen times to find a parking space. There was exactly one shop open—the chemist’s. Everywhere else was closed. The supermarkets on the edge of town were open; so, apparently, were the petrol stations and the doctors’ surgeries. Deemed essential services, they were the only places in town that stayed open; everywhere else, signs in windows apologised for the inconvenience and promised that businesses would re-open…one day.

“One day,” it turned out, was 14th May. Our lockdown lasted fifty days. Seven weeks. Less than two months. But it worked. And it worked partly because of its severity—like I’ve said, almost everything closed, including, crucially, schools. We had cases of COVID—our peak was 89 cases, reported on 2nd April. But by keeping to our bubbles, we gave the virus nowhere to go, and it went away. It was, seriously, that simple. And on 14th May, we moved to Level 2 in the alert-level framework—gatherings were limited to 100 or fewer people, but that was the only restriction that meaningfully disrupted our lives. And on 9th June, we returned to Level 1—normality. Or, to be fair, as close to normal as we can really hope to be right now.

So we did it. We eliminated COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand. We formed our bubbles, we stayed at home, and we eliminated COVID. But, the rest of the world will tell us, we only did it because we’re a small, isolated island nation. But that’s just an excuse. The UK is an island country; it has one of the worst COVID responses in the world. Ireland has a similar population to New Zealand, but it has seen about 35 times the per-capita infection rate. Iceland is quite splendidly isolated (I know; I was there just before the COVID shit hit the global fan); it’s seen about 40 times the per-capita infection rate that New Zealand has).

There are many factors that are cited to account for New Zealand’s relative success in defeating the coronavirus; there are many factors that are irrelevant. The one crucial measure has been our lockdown. It’s been rated as one of the most severe in the world; it also, as we’ve seen, really didn’t last all that long. And now it’s over, and we’re enjoying our freedom—our freedom to live a normal life, our freedom from a totally beatable virus.

We’re enjoying the idea that we’re just better here, but in reality we did nothing that every single other country in the world couldn’t do. What we did is put people ahead of our economy. Economies always recover—even after the Great Depression, the world’s economies, even if it took a wee while, recovered. And New Zealand’s economy is showing signs of having suffered less than most countries’, due to the relative shortness of our lockdown, and of recovering already. People, on the other hand, very, very rarely recover from dying.

So life was, briefly, rough. People lost jobs, but very few people died; unemployment is awful, but death is immeasurably worse. We lost 5 people per million—a comparable rate would have seen about 1,600 people die in the US, instead of over a quarter of a million, or the UK’s 61,000 deaths be more like 325. And those numbers would not still be climbing.

We moved here eleven years ago. I knew then it was a good move; this year we’ve realised just how incredibly fortunate we were to come to Aotearoa when we could.