3.1 Lockdowns Ngā noho rāhui
Introduction | Kupu whakataki
The decision to use lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand was informed by experience in other countries – both positive and negative.
The first reported case of COVID-19 in Aotearoa New Zealand was detected on 28 February 2020, more than two months after the virus was identified in China, and a week or so after small clusters were identified in Europe and the United States. This delay – attributable partly to geographic isolation, and partly to good luck – meant Aotearoa New Zealand had an important opportunity to assess what was happening in other countries before taking action.1
In particular, once COVID-19 started to spread significantly in other countries, decision-makers were able to compare the experience of Italy and parts of the United States (where rapid community transmission had already overwhelmed hospitals and caused many deaths) with that of China, Taiwan and Singapore (where authorities had adopted strong restrictions which somewhat contained the virus).2 On that basis, Cabinet made an informed decision to adopt ‘aggressive and effective containment measures’ such as closing the border.3 As part of this approach, Aotearoa New Zealand, like much of the world, went into ‘lockdown’ in late March 2020.i However the rationale for New Zealand’s lockdown – to break chains of transmission – soon diverged from the rationale in most other parts of the world, where lockdowns were used to keep transmission down to an ‘acceptable’ level.4 This usually meant a level that did not overwhelm health services.
As the need for such a tool had never been anticipated or prepared for, Aotearoa New Zealand had no apparatus in place for an all-of-society lockdown ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. The whole public sector – including those working in both frontline and public health roles – was operating without a playbook, as indeed was everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Two key Cabinet papers from this period drew expressly on international comparisons.
The first (recommending the adoption of the Alert Level System) states:
‘New Zealand has a stark choice. Iran and Italy show dramatically what happens when action is taken too late. Their health systems are overwhelmed which is leading to alarming case fatality rates. The UK appears to be following Italy’s trajectory with a two-week lag. The UK only began responding with significant public health measures after the exponential growth in cases occurred. Following the UK may be Australia in 8–10 days. Without further action, New Zealand may follow the path of Australia, where community transmission is occurring in New South Wales. New Zealand needs to act decisively to increase containment measures if we want to stay on the trajectories of Singapore and Taiwan, notwithstanding cultural differences. As an island nation this is feasible.’
The second Cabinet paper (recommending the move to Alert Levels 3 and 4) states:
‘COVID-19 is rapidly spreading around the world, particularly in Europe and the United States. To date, East Asian countries and territories have been most effective at containing COVID-19 through aggressive and effective containment measures. New Zealand needs to take similar, and urgent, action if we are to avoid exponential growth rates.’
See endnotes 2–3 for details of these documents.
What’s in this chapter
We begin by describing the use of lockdowns in Aotearoa New Zealand and their effects – not only on COVID-19 transmission and cases, but on daily life, access to essential goods and services, work, schools (and other places of learning), employment and more. We also describe how agencies and communities everywhere stepped up to mitigate the worst impacts of the lockdowns, especially on those who were most vulnerable. We examine the lockdowns in three distinct stages.
- Section 3.2.1 describes the first national lockdown (Alert Levels 3 and 4) which occurred between March and May 2020 and lasted seven weeks.
- Section 3.2.2 addresses the series of brief Level 3 lockdowns in Auckland during late 2020 and early 2021, each lasting from a few days to a few weeks.
- The return to Alert Levels 3 and 4 in the second half of 2021 lasted three weeks for most of the country, but stretched on for several months in Auckland, with shorter regional lockdowns for Northland and Waikato; this period of lockdowns is described in section 3.2.3.
In section 3.3, we set out our assessment. We consider not only what lockdowns achieved as a public health measure, but also their impacts – short-term and more lasting – on people, communities, the economy, education and more. Overall, we find that lockdowns were successful for the immediate task at hand. But Aotearoa New Zealand might have been less reliant on lockdowns to achieve elimination had the country benefited from earlier and greater investment in public health capacity. The success of the elimination strategy meant people in Aotearoa New Zealand spent less time living under stringent public health and social restrictions than populations in many other countries. At the same time, many people felt that lockdowns were kept in place for too long, particularly the final lockdown (focused on Auckland) of 2021.
i ‘Lockdown’ was not an official legal term but was used by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern in a press release announcing the first lockdown (see endnote 4 for details). It emerged in global use early in the COVID-19 pandemic to describe combinations of public health measures that heavily curtailed people’s movement in the interests of stopping the virus. Levels 3 and 4 of New Zealand’s Alert Level System can be understood as ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ lockdowns, respectively, because they required people to stay at home, closed schools and businesses, and involved heavy restrictions on public gatherings. We use ‘lockdown’ to describe these aspects of the response, since they were a defining part of the pandemic experience, and most people remember and refer to them this way.