EDITORIAL:

As New Zealand prepares to drop MIQ requirements for some travelers in less than a week, an Australian state is opening a brand new regional quarantine centre.

Queensland’s A$48.8 million 500-bed facility at Wellcamp,
west of Toowoomba, will soon increase to 1000 places.

It will be joined by another MIQ hub near Brisbane Airport.

Australia’s federal government also funds quarantine centers in Victoria and Western Australia, and the country has seen how they work with the Howard Springs camp in Darwin.

It comes as Australia’s borders open to vaccinated international tourists and visa holders from today, dramatically reducing the managed quarantine system.

In Queensland, the new non-hotel quarantine facilities will be used for unvaccinated international travellers.

Although there appears to be less need for them with the reopening, the purpose-built facilities are an example of Australia making changes to improve its position in the face of a future pandemic. Australia is ahead of New Zealand in this example of building back better, but we could always follow suit.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said: “Three years ago we didn’t have a pandemic…I know I’m preparing this state for whatever comes our way.”

In her February 3 speech outlining the reopening dates, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that here a basic capacity would be maintained which could be strengthened, which will form the basis of a future national quarantine service. New Zealand would likely have custom-designed facilities that could be built or modified.

As New Zealand begins its reopening process amid a difficult Omicron outbreak and with the unresolved issue of the anti-mandate protest in Parliament, it’s easy to think future planning can wait. Booster shots, for example, are crucial with Omicron, but their number has decreased.

From midnight next Sunday, the first phase begins with vaccinated New Zealanders allowed to enter from Australia. Two weeks later, the border will reopen to Kiwis from the rest of the world and visa holders, starting March 14. MIQ will be replaced by self-isolation and Covid-19 testing on arrival for most people, but will remain for the unvaccinated.

For New Zealand and Australia, these reopening moves are huge – coming two years after borders were generally closed to the rest of the world.

But it should be remembered that the pandemic is not over, that new variants will emerge and that some regions of the world have low vaccination coverage. And virus leakage has become a regular occurrence over this century. Covid (2019) is a coronavirus like previous pandemic viruses such as Sars (2003) and Mers (2012). There was also H1N1 (2009), Ebola (2014), Zika (2015).

Deakin University epidemiologist Professor Catherine Bennett said in December that Omicron had shown that there would be a need for a purpose-built quarantine in the future.

“The argument has always been that it would play a long-term role when new worrying variants emerge,” she said, adding that it was safer than quarantine in hotels.

Experts have been advocating for this for a long time here. If another major virus breakout occurs, New Zealand would not want to be dependent on the hotel MIQ again.

This system has worked primarily to keep New Zealanders safe and has allowed tens of thousands of Kiwis to return. However, the virus – very costly – seeped into the community, there was insufficient capacity to meet demand and it became a political liability with stories of suffering and separated families.

Omicron has currently rendered the MIQ obsolete with daily community cases of over 1000 and few at the border. But that will not be the case in a future pandemic.