Flying with the Virus: inside the Bubble.
On Monday, March 23, 2020, New Zealand announced it would move to a Level 4 lockdown to combat the Caronvirus. Among the directives and guidelines regarding the lockdown, there was the introduction of the word “bubble”, as in “You can only go outside to exercise with the people in your bubble.” (from the official New Zealand government Level 4 guidelines).
The bubble is your family and the people you live with.
Fast forward to the present and the bubble talk has now extended from family to countries so as to allow Trans-Tasman international air travel. To put it more clearly: to allow scheduled air travel to resume between New Zealand and Australia; a so-called Trans-Tasman bubble.
The many practical and logistics issues to be ironed out should take place during a resumption Zealand and Australia domestic scheduled flights. There is much work to be done in this respect: pre-boarding temperature checks, masks, sanitizers, baggage sanitation, one passenger per row etc., etc. We may, however, be surprised to see scheduled domestic flights resume sooner rather than later, as New Zealand and Australia continue down their easing paths.
The next step is to extend the bubble concept to the Pacific Island States such as Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga. There are close cultural links to all these islands, who shut down borders very early and in consequence have low levels of infection cases (Fiji, for example, has a total of only 18 cases). Besides culture, there are good business reasons for extending bubbles to these countries: these are big Downunder holiday destinations and naturally are very dependent on the tourism trade; they also supply much-needed labour to the Australian and New Zealand agricultural fruit and vegetable growers, via temporary work visas.
Taking this bubble approach further, we can see it extended to other ‘compliant’ countries that acted quickly to flatten the curve and that are further away than just across ‘the ditch’, as the local saying goes. Although the logistics involved are much more complex, as it is one thing to hop on a 3-hour Trans-Tasman flight and quite another to take a 24-hour multiple stopover flight to Europe, for example, even if all counties along the way are compliant.
One thing is perhaps for sure: the chaos as described by McKay Coppins in his recent article in The Atlantic ‘I Just Flew. It Was Worse Than I Thought It Would Be.’ is not the way to go.
As they say: only in America.
Who, one wonders, may not be seeing many international tourists for a while and who may also find the road back to becoming an international tourist again will equally be a long one.
