Andrew Dickens Afternoons

This weekend saw the one year anniversary of the quarantine system that has now entered all our lives - MIQ. You’ll remember it started in February 2020 with a fleet of campervans on a Whangaparaoa Peninsula Naval base housing a couple of hundred Kiwi refuges from Wuhan. Then New Zealanders were asked to self-isolate, which we proved to be spectacularly unreliable at, so a government mandates and monitored quarantine system was initiated in mid-April 2020 It has been a huge undertaking.  MIQ involves 4500 rooms around the country in 32 hotels. 130,000 New Zealanders have passed through.  There have been 850 cases of Covid 19 in the facilities including 95 active cases right now. There are 4000 staff.  They have delivered 9.1 million meals and snacks, and conducted more than 900 swabs each day. Brigadier Jim Bliss says MIQ had grown into a "massive logistical exercise which runs incredibly smoothly and has served our country very well". He also says what MIQ has achieved is beyond belief And that on the whole