12
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Some New Zealanders find a harsh homecoming amid concern about importing coronavirus after months of lockdown sacrifice by ‘team of 5 million’
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- Title
- 'Stay away from us': New Zealanders returning home to Covid 'lifeboat' face backlash
- Authors
- Charlotte Graham-McLay
- Published
- Jun 24 2020
- Word count
- 1089 words
That sounds like pretty justifiable anger on the part of New Zealanders.
But that anger would surely be better directed at the public officials or doctors who made the decision, not the individuals in question. They may well have believed they were doing nothing wrong, and it's not really their job to determine if they represent a public health risk.
You would think! But unfortunately, there's a significant amount of evidence that these two individuals—nicknamed Thelma & Disease—lied to officials to justify their compassionate exemption, and subsequently did not detail the full story of their adventures.
This was all coupled with incompetence from the ministry's side too. It was a chain of failure which compromised our strongly-fought COVID-19 security and isolation process, and nearly all parties, including the two women at the centre of it all, share some of the blame.
As @omnicrola said, we did 5 weeks of an extremely strict lockdown that consisted of "don't leave the house except for emergencies, food, and exercise", which had extremely high levels of compliance, and saw us drastically cut the number of cases and eliminate community transition entirely. When the bar of quality is 100%, anything less is unacceptable. That's why this was such a frustrating event.
There is a lot of anger towards the Minister of Health at the moment, but that is more because he threw New Zealands favorite public health official under the bus (Dr Ashley Bloomfield.)
Most of the anger is directed at the two "poms" because who else are you going to blame?
Arden (the prime minister of NZ) accepted responsibility and committed to ensure this mistake would never happen again.
The contrast is incredibly stark between Arden's unifying and calming message, the slightly divisive approach from Australians PM, and the incredibly divisive rhetoric from Trump.
It's because a information was made public, it sounded like every step of the way the two women lied to officials.
Yep. The New Zealand government advised overseas New Zealanders to return home immediately months ago—in fact most nations advised their citizens of this. People obviously have autonomy over themselves, so the government can't make that decision for them, but for them to finally return only when the rest of the world starts going to shit due to fears of a second wave, risks New Zealand's status as a COVID-19-eliminated country.
It's reasonable that there's no guaranteeing for what sort of experience they were signing up for by returning home now, so yes, they need to face the consequences of mandatory testing and a minimum of two weeks in self-isolation. So, after every other New Zealander has experienced over 5 weeks in self-isolation during our nationwide lockdown, seeing returnees now complaining about food and bus rides is definitely going to prompt some acerbic reactions.
Yeah, I usually change links away from AMP versions, and would like to eventually have that happen automatically (which is pretty easy, since AMP pages always have a
<link rel="canonical">
tag that points to the normal version).I think the one person who is quoted makes a very reasonable request:
I definitely get the heightened sense of fight/flight though. Not only are people wanting to keep themselves and their families safe, there's also an enormous 5-million-strong tribalistic bond over all the hardship everyone just went through to get the virus squashed. Having that much collective effort potentially just "thrown away" because a few people screwed up has got to be infuriating.