But each new idea hit a brick wall: the country does not have the suitable health or security staff to sustain more MIQ places. Commissioning new, purpose-built MIQ spots could create as many problems as it would solve.
Even if we built gold-standard quarantine accommodation, we wouldn't have enough qualified staff to run them. Or if we did, we'd risk collapsing our existing health service.
When Covid-19 struck, there were questions over whether our top tourism hotels were the best facilities for managing isolation and quarantine cases. An early attempt to accommodate a plane-load of returning Kiwis at the Whangaparāoa Military Training Facility in north Auckland proved cumbersome. Evacuees from Wuhan, China, were housed in campervans but it was clear from early on this would not work for the numbers wanting to return.
Tourism hotels, then empty after international arrivals ceased, were the natural fit, although security gaps or ventilation deficiencies proved some better than others.
But also, throughout the past 18 months of the pandemic, it has been clear via the breaches that New Zealand's capacity to handle the human foibles of enforced quarantine has been at times, under-strength in key areas.
The fear of a health service over-run by out-of-control community spread was behind our early strategy of going hard and early, and the current painstaking vaccine rollout is constrained by the same issue. In both cases, we are trying to protect and sustain an under-staffed, under-resourced health service.
The New Zealand Nurses Organisation warned in a 2018 strategy document that: "New Zealand has an over-reliance on short-term, high-turnover immigration to fill nursing skills shortages." As in many other sectors, we relied on a tap that was shut off.
Despite the staffing issue, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern now says ministers are thinking about the "arrangements we might have in future" and "what kind of capacity we might need".
And despite overtures from the private sector, the latest position of government officials is for state-owned-and-operated facilities in the long term. "From a risk management perspective, the safest option would be for the Government to maintain a leadership role in the establishment and running of all MIQ facilities, regardless of their configuration," officials say.
Given the repeated advice on staffing as a major stumbling block, It's to be hoped there is planning under way to address this. Recruitment, training and retention are all necessary to overcome it.
Covid should have left us with no illusions that in a bio-dynamic world that will challenge us again, to under-resource our frontline health system is to leave our very lives on the line.
