COVID-19: Our border bubbles, potential risks and rewards

We are in a strong position internationally being now effectively free of the COVID-19 virus. Next is to decide how to selectively open our borders to travellers: tourists, relatives visiting, and creative and business people. The decisions will be balanced on the risk of infected travellers crossing our border against the rewards to New Zealand from the connection.

First how badly and how well have countries handled the pandemic? Based on self-reported cases, the worst on the world table is United States, and about the best was Vietnam.  By early June the United States had suffered 112,000 COVID deaths and Vietnam zero deaths. In between was United Kingdom 40,000, China 4,700 and New Zealand 22 COVID deaths. The table converts these total numbers to incidence per million people in a number of countries to give a comparable perspective.

Europe, UK and Spain have the worst record and Greece has one of the best.  It is worth bearing that in mind when we look at potential ‘bubbles’ of country groups.

The numbers establish that New Zealand and Australia are on the same playing field with a low contained incidence of about 300 cases per million. The mechanics and procedures for trans-Tasman travel are being developed, and this bubble appears a relatively safe extension of each country’s situation.

We assume that a trans-Tasman bubble is almost certain. We could now look at the Austria-promoted ‘Early Movers’, then at well-performed Southeast Asia and at China. The nine in the ‘Early Movers’ initiative promoted by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz are Austria, Australia and New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Czechia, Israel and Singapore. The group of countries successfully controlling COVID in Southeast Asia include Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and South Korea. The currently not quite so successful are the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore. Then there is the ‘elephant in the room’ for New Zealand, China.

We need to assess the risk of opening our borders to the countries in these clusters. The risk is determined not only by their cases to date but by the potential for their virus infections to be transferred to New Zealand. The main factors to be considered include:

• The number of new cases daily and thus the current flow of pre-symptomatic potential carriers
• The number of symptomatic cases ‘active’ in their population which can create more COVID carriers.

The ‘Early Movers’ initiative is being promoted by Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. The ‘Early Movers’ in fact moved later than us so have higher case numbers, higher incidence of active cases and are not very strong trading partners with New Zealand. This group has a generally reasonable performance in containing COVID-19.

It does appear that most except Singapore and Israel have their epidemic under some control as they are experiencing ten or fewer new cases per day per million population. Greece is the only member with zero or one case per day, like New Zealand and Australia.

The assessment is that the small populations and our limited trading benefits available with these ‘Early Movers’ may not justify the effort to create a secure border link with them. That is except for Singapore which gives major access to Southeast Asia.

The countries of Southeast Asia as a whole seem to have avoided the large, rapid increases in COVID cases experienced first in Europe and now in North and South America. Southeast Asia also has strong markets and has had good air access to New Zealand through Singapore, Seoul, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.

The target Southeast Asian group of Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia have their outbreaks contained, and have a total population of 250 million people, many of which are middle or higher income. Undoubtedly Singapore will contain the cases the way it has minimised deaths, and could join the successful group. We show the numbers for these five countries and the Philippines and Indonesia in the table.

Six of the seven countries have a case incidence less than New Zealand and four of them have zero or one new case per day per million people. Singapore is the main outlier for total cases and new cases per day, though their daily rate is past its worst.

Philippines and Indonesia have a high level of total cases still active, which is a potential risk to transmission at this stage.

The situation with China appears clear. From early on in the pandemic there was a very thorough investigation of the handling of the epidemic. The WHO mission of 25 international experts to China during February confirmed the veracity of China’s case reporting.  The current number is 67 active cases. There seems little risk and a lot of reward to carefully opening the border.

The WHO mission had experts in all of the relevant fields and included professionals from Europe, USA, other Asian countries and China. This mission documented the measures taken in China to control the virus, and gave comprehensive advice to other countries as to the measures required to control it. The countries which have been successful, like New Zealand, have used measures similar to those recommended by the WHO mission.

The incidence rate in China is very low, and in tracking the international data since March 26, we have observed only few additions to case numbers over that time. From a health and risk viewpoint there would seem to be a sound basis for exploring the resumption of some cross-border connections with China, on a similar basis of the prudent measures as with Australia.

The postscript list of other countries whose borders we should monitor is a long one. United States is an obvious one, and perhaps the other SANZAAR partners. The United States, South Africa and Argentina all have active cases which are about 60 percent of their total cases, meaning there is a strong pool of infection for exporting. United Kingdom appears to have lowered the curve recently, but still has a way to go.