From: brewnoser2@gmail.com   
      
   Informative article, although in reading you might notice right wing bias and   
   shots at left wing persona. If you look up the author of the piece, and where   
   he lives, you'll find him to be a bit of a right wing whiner as well. See his   
   Twitter posts.   
   _______________________________   
      
   Jan 30, 2021 - National Post   
      
   Don't like Canada's new mandatory quarantine? It's part of why New Zealand is   
   now back to normal   
      
   By March 20, New Zealand closed its border to basically anyone except   
   residents, directly in opposition to the recommendations of the WHO   
      
   On Friday the Government of Canada announced a new program prescribing   
   mandatory supervised hotel quarantines for all travellers entering the   
   country. It’s one of the strictest measures yet imposed in the fight against   
   COVID-19, but it’s a measure    
   with good precedent: New Zealand, one of the most enthusiastic adopters of   
   mandatory hotel quarantines, has been ranked the best performing county in an   
   index of almost 100 countries based on their containment of the coronavirus.   
      
   As we here in Canada undertake the grim task of reviewing our ICU triage   
   protocols, New Zealanders are packing into stadiums without masks and   
   celebrating New Year’s Eve in dense crowds just like the old days. COVID-19   
   has killed 18,000 Canadians and    
   counting, while New Zealand is at 25 deaths. The Pacific Island nation had a   
   breach this week, with a couple of positive cases of the South African COVID   
   variant, all linked to the same quarantine facility in Auckland. While New   
   Zealand has been lucky,    
   it largely has itself to credit for its success.   
      
   Being an island in the middle of nowhere does help   
      
   New Zealand is a developed country plugged into world trade with a vibrant   
   tourist sector, so there’s no inherent geographic reason they couldn’t   
   have been hit by COVID-19 as hard as everybody else. Notably, another   
   English-speaking island nation —    
   Ireland — counted the world’s highest COVID-19 rate recently. But when it   
   comes to containing pandemics, it’s no accident that some of the countries   
   best able to ward off COVID-19 (Taiwan, Japan, Singapore) have been islands.   
   If Canada wants to    
   close its borders, it has to worry about more than 100 land crossings with the   
   United States, not to mention a porous 9,000 kilometre border littered with   
   illicit conduits. But when New Zealand wants to crack down on who gets in, all   
   it really has to do    
   is keep an eye on its six international airports.   
      
   The country’s isolation and small size also means it had far fewer foreign   
   arrivals potentially seeding New Zealand communities with COVID-19 in the   
   early days of the pandemic. In all of 2019, 3.8 million people entered New   
   Zealand from abroad,    
   including both tourists and citizens returning home. By contrast, in 2019   
   Canada counted 22.1 million foreign arrivals and 12.3 million of its own   
   citizens returning home from foreign countries. In addition, while most   
   foreigners coming into New Zealand    
   hail from Australia — another country largely sidestepped by the pandemic   
   — Canada had to contend with having a number of direct air links with many   
   of the earliest COVID-19 epicentres, such as Italy, Iran and New York City.   
      
   Borders closed much, much earlier   
      
   Even after China imposed a complete lockdown on Wuhan, the city that spawned   
   COVID-19, Canadian public health officials vigorously resisted all requests   
   for a travel ban or even basic screening of air travellers from the affected   
   areas of China. In one    
   statement that has failed to age well, Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam   
   told a Commons committee on January 29, 2020 “as I have always said, the   
   epidemic of fear could be more difficult to control than the epidemic   
   itself.” New Zealand, like    
   its Pacific Rim neighbours such as South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, had no such   
   qualms. On February 2, before it had even recorded any confirmed cases, New   
   Zealand completely closed its border with China and implemented tight   
   screening on all other    
   incoming travellers. By March 20, they had ramped up border controls to shut   
   out basically anyone except New Zealand residents.   
      
   These measures were directly in opposition to the recommendations of the World   
   Health Organization, who at the time were claiming that travel restrictions   
   were “ineffective in most cases.” The border closures did not prevent   
   COVID-19 from breaking    
   out in New Zealand communities, but when paired with some of the world’s   
   strictest lockdown measures, it allowed the country to completely purge itself   
   of active cases by August. “Rapid, science-based risk assessment linked to   
   early, decisive    
   government action was critical,” concluded an assessment in the New England   
   Journal of Medicine.   
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   The Kiwis take their quarantine way more seriously   
      
   It is very, very difficult to get into New Zealand right now. Even if you’re   
   a New Zealand citizen, returning home is a highly regulated process that   
   requires booking a spot in what’s known as Managed Isolation and Quarantine   
   (MIQ). All arrivals are    
   immediately sent to government-managed hotels where they are isolated for 14   
   days, provided with meals and tested regularly. The system is currently booked   
   up until April, so any Kiwi looking to jet overseas for a wedding or to sit at   
   the deathbed of a    
   loved one faces the prospect of being locked out of their home country for at   
   least three months.   
      
   Until the new restrictions, Canada’s quarantine of international travellers,   
   by contrast, has depended largely on the honour system. As of January 7,   
   incoming travellers to Canada needed to provide proof of a negative COVID-19   
   test, but prior to that    
   the only real requirement was that foreign arrivals needed to pledge to   
   quarantine for 14 days. Incredibly, Canada didn’t implement even basic   
   airport temperature checks until July.   
      
   The New Zealand system is expensive (roughly $6,000 per arrival) but it’s   
   very effective. As of October, 2020, the MIQ system had caught 215 cases of   
   travellers entering New Zealand with a COVID-19 infection. On one particular   
   flight from Dubai, seven    
   passengers were found to be infected once in MIQ, despite the fact that they   
   had tested negative for COVID-19 just before departure.   
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   There is much less red tape getting in the way   
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)