Letter from New Zealand: COVID a World Away

Editor’s Note: Many years ago in Prague, I had a very boring job, the silver of lining of which was the opportunity to meet a very good person — a fellow Canadian named Charmead Schella. She now lives in New Zealand, a country that has distinguished itself internationally by its response to COVID-19. I was curious about how she and her family have experienced the pandemic so I asked her to write me a letter from New Zealand and she delivered. I hope you enjoy her reflections as much as I did.

 

I first heard about COVID-19 just after Christmas 2019, but it didn’t yet have a name.

I was sitting poolside at my in-laws’, just two farms down the road from our house. It was a stunning New Zealand summer day. My boys were splashing loudly in the pool; the sky was Hollywood blue; and the tuis were chattering to one another in the pohutukawa tree behind the fence.

We’d been living in New Zealand for about three and half years at that point. I felt safe, was comfortable in my new life, and enjoying getting to know the country my husband was born and raised in. Canada could not have felt further away as I thought about Christmas with snow, roasted turkey, and short winter days.

My husband put his tablet down, lowered his glasses, and looked hard at our children in the water. Then he said that China was reporting some unusual cases of pneumonia that were affecting a lot of people in a concentrated area inland. He expressed anxious surprise that this news had surfaced outside of China, suggesting it must be serious for that to happen. We discussed it for a brief while, then conversation turned to other things: the bush fires in Australia, the receding economy, New Zealand’s summer school break, how my family in Ontario was coping with the snow.

In retrospect, the situation escalated quickly after that, although nothing feels that way in real time.
I returned to my position as senior communications advisor at the port in our country’s capital after a brief Christmas and New Year’s leave. I felt refreshed.

By the first week of January, the strange virus that had started in a small area of China – Wuhan — and was now spreading through the country began making headlines in New Zealand. The World Health Organisation (WHO) was calling it an outbreak; a viral outbreak that was some form of unknown coronavirus. A week later, the first death due to COVID-19 was claimed in China. A week after that, the first case outside China was documented: a woman in Thailand who had been to Wuhan. Then a person in Japan who had been to Wuhan contracted the illness. A few days after that, the United States and South Korea reported cases that could be traced back to Wuhan. It was like someone had hit the ‘fast forward’ button.

On January 23, Wuhan went into lockdown.

 

New Zealand, by this point, was paying focused attention to the situation. Our Prime Minister, Labour’s Jacinda Ardern, was poised for action, although in true Kiwi style, she took the impending crisis in stride.

There were 7,818 confirmed cases worldwide on January 30 according to the WHO. Here in New Zealand, my children had both returned to school following the wind-up of their annual summer holidays on January 27. While we read about the virus every day through the news and on social media, it still seemed very far from our lives. It was a headline in a newspaper, nothing more.

Not much was known about the virus at that time. The WHO thought that human-to-human transmission wasn’t possible, and that people had picked it up at a seafood market in Wuhan. There was no thought to the virus being spread via community transmission, although it was emerging that the incubation period of the virus was less than two weeks.

On February 2, the first death outside China occurred when a man died in the Philippines. The WHO began formally warning other countries that the virus could spread.

New Zealand took a hardline on February 3, temporarily banning the entry of foreigners from, or those travelling through, mainland China. Kiwis en route home to New Zealand were allowed entry into the country, but were asked to self-isolate for two weeks upon arrival.

Those self-isolating received a daily phone call from a public health officer to make sure they were staying put for the required two weeks. It was an honour system that seemed to work.

Things sped up quickly after that point, when Jacinda chartered a plane to evacuate New Zealanders from Wuhan on February 4. Later that week, the Ministry of Health mandated that arrivals from or via China had to register their 14-day self-isolations with its health line.

On February 12, the mystery coronavirus became ‘COVID-19.’

 

For the next week, COVID-19 became a hot topic of conversation around my family’s dinner table. The boys were learning about it at their schools, often asking my husband and me questions they were hearing in the schoolyard like: ‘If I catch it, will I die?’

Obsessive hand-washing became commonplace in my home, at the boys’ school, and at the port where I worked. “Sing Happy Birthday in your head twice when washing your hands – then you know you’ve killed the invisible germs that might be on your hands. TWICE,” I stressed. “Once is not enough.”

I taught and retaught my sons how to cough and sneeze into their elbows. I made games out of exaggerated hygiene practices. Like the rest of the world, I was starting to get really worried about the virus’ transmission and how easily my family could get sick.

At the port, we monitored the international situation unfolding around cruise ships because, being summer in the Southern Hemisphere, COVID-19 was unfolding during peak tourist season for New Zealand. This past season, had it not been truncated by the virus, was slotted to be Wellington’s biggest cruise season to date with 123 vessels coming to call. The season was cut short before this could be realized, a bitter disappointment for us, the city and tourism New Zealand.

But the Diamond Princess cruise ship moored just off the coast of Japan was of concern not just to us, but to the global community. On a personal note, there were several Kiwis on the vessel, with six evacuated home and four admitted to hospital in Japan. Their presence on the ship brought COVID-19 into the homes of most New Zealanders through the six o’clock news. We were all paying close attention now –-New Zealand is a shining example of biosecurity theory and practices; could we keep COVID-19 from coming in and, if not, could we eradicate it if it snuck by our defenses?

By February 25, the daily tally of new cases outside of China exceeded new cases inside China for the first time since the virus broke.

My son turned 11 on February 27 and while we were knee-deep in renovating a barn into what would become our house, we promised him a sleep-over party with his four closest buddies once the rebuild was complete. We thought that would be in about a month’s time. He reluctantly agreed to the belated party – how could he or we have ever known that the country was about to enter a complete lockdown and sleep-overs would become a hippie dream of years past?

The next day, New Zealand confirmed its first case of COVID-19 and also extended its ban on foreigners entering the country via Iran. A few days later, New Zealand mandated that people arriving from Italy and South Korea had to self-isolate for 14 days. COVID-19 was spreading like wildfire in the wind all around the world.

The first week of March brought four new cases of COVID-19 in New Zealand and then, on March 11, the WHO declared a global pandemic. That was it for us – COVID-19 was big, here, and dangerous.

 

It was one day later that I did a much-larger-than-usual grocery shop at my local Pak n Save. I stocked up on import items: pasta, rice, coffee, flour, sugar, tea and coffee. I already had a lot of canned and frozen goods in storage at home: tomatoes, soups and broths, fruit, vegetables, jams and chutneys. My husband does most meal prep in our family, and is a fabulous baker as well as cook. He bakes all our bread, cookies, pies and muffins. Together with my in-laws down the road, we share livestock for our own consumption: sheep and cattle; and ducks and chickens supply us with eggs aplenty.

The night of the big grocery shop, I also stopped by The Warehouse – New Zealand’s equivalent to Walmart – and bought a couple of new board games, a deck of playing cards, Harry Potter DVDs that were in the bargain bin, and Easter chocolate enough for a decent hunt. I had an inkling that consumerism was about to change and that we’d best get in front of whatever was coming.
My husband took the boys to our public library and they checked out two bags of books.

More cases sprouted in New Zealand, with several clusters emerging seemingly out of nowhere – one in Auckland and a second in Bluff, the very southern tip of the South Island, from a big international wedding.

COVID-19 was the topic of all discussion; at work in the lunchroom, at home at the dinner table, on the commuter train that shuttles nearly 3,500 people from my sleepy seaside town into Wellington each day.

People were becoming very worried about getting sick.

It was around then that my husband and I made the decision to pull our boys out of school since my husband works from home and we felt that the positive impact of minimizing communication risk would far outweigh any negative. The boys were delighted and I was relieved to know that they were safe at home, out of the virus’ way.

The government put together a COVID-19 action committee led jointly by Jacinda and the Director-General of Health, Dr. Ashley Bloomfield. Jacinda and Ashley introduced press briefings mid-March each day at 1PM, as well as a four-level public alert system to benchmark and measure the present risk of COVID-19 to community in New Zealand. The tagline for the COVID-19 campaign is ‘Be kind.’

Then, on March 19, while I was on a Metlink Kāpiti Line train homeward bound, Jacinda called an impromptu press briefing. I watched live on my phone’s tiny screen as Jacinda told New Zealand that effective that evening at 11:59PM she was closing the country’s borders.

Stunned, I called home from the train and my husband said he had been watching, too.

Making use of the alert system, New Zealand entered a Level 3 lockdown on March 23 which meant non-essential businesses were closed, discretionary domestic air travel was banned, and all events and gatherings cancelled.

Forty-eight hours later, Level 4 – our highest and most serious level of the newly created alert level – was declared. Under this policy, what the PM dubbed “going hard and going early,” people were urged to maintain physical contact only with those “in their bubble.” Everything except essential services was closed.

 

The port was prepared as it had been watching the virus approach New Zealand from a distance, and had the advantage of time. As a country, we also had the benefit of watching other countries get the response wrong.

The IT department at work organized all technology requirements for working-from-home for about 75 people. It was a Herculean effort that proved invaluable when the lockdown was declared with only two days’ notice.

I was one of the lucky ones who was deemed essential in my role communicating to the frontline workers of the port. I kept our internal communication channels alive with stories of our people and their selfless, tireless heroics as they labored to keep food, medical supplies and other essential resources flowing into the country while the world battled this resilient new virus.

I also supported my manager in rolling out external communications and managing our reputational risk during the pandemic’s lockdown. I sat on the port’s COVID-19 advisory committee, and provided advice through a communications lens. I learned more about crisis communications firsthand than I had learned through years of studying theory.

All business meetings were conducted via Microsoft Teams on video calls. It was a new way to work and there were growing pains, but we managed and even mastered the calls. My days were structured around scheduled check-ins with my boss (he and I are the only two communications professionals at our port), video meetings and interviews, and Jacinda and Ashley’s 1PM daily national COVID-19 briefings.

 

The 1PM briefings were something we all watched as a family together on big screen computer in my writing studio. Ashley and Jacinda became part of our family; touchstones in a time of unsettled confusion and uncertainty. My boys speak of them both by their first names with affection and familiarity.

The boys, like the rest of the country’s school-aged kids, were studying via distance learning, with regular check-ins with their classes and teachers on video conferencing. My boys are lucky to each have a laptop, and our home is equipped with high-speed wifi, although we live rurally. My husband and I are both trained teachers, so we quickly drew up daily schedules for them and crossed our fingers. We allocated time to support different aspects of the boys’ study: Chris was responsible for gym class, history, math, geography and science. I taught reading, writing, social studies, te reo Māori, and film (to my son in high school). We scheduled time in their school days for Lego-building and puzzle-solving, as well as music practice. We all had to do our part to make the boat float.

Throughout lockdown, I insisted on taking an hour and a half for lunch so that I could be with my family and normalize even a small part of their days – and mine, too. (My boss was very supportive.) We would prepare lunch together, eat and talk about our mornings, then take a walk over our 5 acre property – rain or shine.

Lockdown hit when summer was just beginning to wane into fall. The lambs were weaned, the ducklings had grown flight feathers, and the paddock’s ponds were drying up. We made great adventures of our lunch hours together as a family by making ‘mudshoes’ in the fashion of snowshoes, and walking across the ponds. We built a tree fort. We fed the eels in one of the ponds regularly enough that they started to come to the water’s surface at the same time each day to greet us.

At home, my husband, suddenly presented with the unreal gift of time, carried on with the rebuild of our barn-house. The morning lockdown came into effect was to be the last visit by both the plumber and the electrician, ensuring the house was ready and safe to live in. They didn’t come.

My husband, a carpenter and builder by trade, used this extra time to create finer details for walls, shelves, flooring, doors and skirting boards than he would have bothered with under our previous deadlines. He spent hours in his workshop planning, creating and then executing finicky ornate detail for the barn-house. And the boys helped him.

My husband’s dad would walk down the road to our house and help with the build from the appropriate distance. That part was strange; I am a very physical person and hugs are part of every conversation for me.

We would end the day with a socially-distanced beer or gin and tonic – my dad-in-law on a bench in the garden, us sitting on the retaining wall by the house, conversing across the metres.

 

Essential services, like medical centers and grocery stores, stayed open throughout. My husband did all the shopping trips for us and for his parents up the road. He wore gloves and a mask for the trips and told of the social distancing efforts implemented by the stores – standing markings on the sidewalks where people should queue, glass shields in front of cashier kiosks, saran-wrapped debit machine consoles. He would leave the groceries in the car trunk for a day before bringing them inside the house to put away, and discard his PPE in the garage garbage bin.

We were washing our hands a lot.

I caught a cold. Worried that it might be something more, I called my doctor who immediately sent me to a COVID-19 testing drive-through facility in the parking lot of the local mall. I took the free test through a small opening in my car window – a throat and nasal swab. The test took all of one minute, and the results were back within 48 hours – negative. All New Zealand COVID-19 tests are free and to date 441,123 tests have been administered in a country with a total population of just under five million people.

We walked the dog every night after dinner. Our usual stroll encompassed the property, but we eventually branched out after realizing that there were no vehicles on the highway. The quiet and stillness was unsettling, then soothing. We walked our dog off-leash, reaching a freedom for us all that was comforting.

The COVID-19 Level 4 lockdown was a time of unexpected togetherness and connectedness for me and my family. We were some of the very lucky ones who didn’t have to worry about financials, job loss, getting on each other’s nerves due to limited space, or running out of wine. We managed just fine.
Jacinda announced that the country would go into Alert Level 1 at 11:59 PM on June 8. By Monday June 15, the boys were both back to school and I was back on the Kāpiti Line commuter train, sailing into the city to work on-site once again.

Mandatory PPE, except for very special circumstances, was dropped and social distancing was abolished.

Effectively, COVID-19 had been eradicated from New Zealand’s shores.

 

As I write, our international borders are still closed, but the government is considering a ‘Pacific Bubble’ with the Cook Islands — 15 South Pacific islands northeast of New Zealand whose citizens are also citizens of New Zealand.

Domestic travel is back and encouraged, as the country tries to bolster the economy via the tourism trade it has relied on for so long. This is supported internally by uncharacteristic seat sales by both New Zealand airlines, Air New Zealand and Jet Star and accommodation special pricing.

Free COVID-19 testing is still being carried out nationally. There are currently 283,654 COVID-19 tests available, should they be required.

Last week, Jacinda announced her cabinet’s plan for COVID-19 outbreaks going forward, which are focused on regional lockdowns rather than a national one. While the PM said that she would lockdown the country if deemed necessary to stop wide spread again, it would be a last resort as the Labour government looks to find the best way to control COVID-19 here with the ‘least intrusive measures’ possible.

While I watch with horrified fascination as some countries still prioritize the economy over people’s health, I am deeply grateful for the New Zealand government’s confident, decisive and quick action to ‘go hard and go early,’ choosing community over money.

Be kind –- a solid mantra for life.

Featured photo: New Zealand coastline by Charmead Schella.

 

Raised in Peterborough, Ontario,Charmead Schellastudied journalism and writing at Carleton University in Ottawa. She has spent her life communicating on various platforms and through many channels. A traveler at heart, she has lived around the world, sharing her view through a camera lens and her pen. She currently lives in Paraparaumu, New Zealand, with her husband, two sons, rescue dog Rio and a menagerie of furry and feathered creatures.