Comment: One in five Kiwis would fly sick as travel testing ends

Travellers will no longer need to provide results from a pre-departure test to enter the country. Photo / Getty Images

Comment:

New Zealand's pandemic ended not with bang, but in a whimper of online-forms and half-completed RATs.

From midnight tonight, you'll no longer need a negative Covid-19 test to enter the country. So, are we over the pandemic's final travel barrier?

The last practical hurdle to travel and the biggest factor putting off international trips was the prospect of catching Covid while abroad. Worse still, missing flights, having to isolate at your own expense while being blocked from coming home.

Although the official advice from the ministry of health and airlines is to delay your travel if you're sick, most travellers would rather come home rather than face being stuck abroad.

One in five Kiwis say they'd still fly home with Covid, according to a recent Herald poll.

Over sixty percent of New Zealanders say they would fly while sick, with only two thirds of these respondents saying they'd bother to take a Covid-19 test first.

Once in the country, there is not much pressure to comply with testing requirements, either.

Last week it was revealed that one in ten returnees don't even bother to report their Covid 19 tests on return.

With more health tests being put in the hands of the travellers and their self-assessed tick boxes, there's a view that Covid-19 is no longer the border-closing public emergency it once was.

Apart from the formalities, travel restrictions into New Zealand are essentially over.

You will still need to complete a traveller Declaration Form to board a plane into the country. However, without any need for testing requirements or even proof of vaccination for New Zealand residents, it is a mere rubber-stamping exercise.

HistoPath one of the biggest providers of tests at Australian airports, says it is already seeing a number of cancellations from travellers heading across the ditch. New Zealand was one of the largest markets for those requiring a pre-flight test. However, with Bali the US and now Australia's nearest neighbour ditching the pre-departure tests, there are few destinations requiring tourists to book in a swab.

A spokesperson from the pathology centre said they were seeing a positive case rate of around 2 per cent on supervised RATs and more accurate PCR tests. Other test centres reported higher at around 4 per cent.

There have been several false-starts, or rather stops, to the pandemic. HistoPath said that they had been looking to wind-up business for travel tests by December last year, until the emergence of Omicron. The company says it will keep contracts in place should they need to ramp up capacity.

As for the number of travellers stopped travelling by the Declaration, the number is vanishingly small.

Sharon May, Customs deputy chief executive for Finance Technology and Infrastructure, said that a tiny proportion of travellers had been refused entry into New Zealand due to the declaration.

Since coming into place in March "391,265 air passenger traveller declarations have been completed successfully" and 00.02 per cent failing to meet requirements to enter New Zealand.

The traveller declaration is now just formality for rubber-stamping travel. Without any requirements for testing or even vaccination status, it's one that is now in the hands of travellers themselves. Need New Zealanders fill in one at all?