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By Katie Todd for RNZ
The country’s isolation hotels are almost completely booked until Christmas, blocking some New Zealanders who had planned to return home to see those they enjoyed.
They implore the government to lose more space, but he says it’s through the workforce.
Kimberlee Everett had just received a visa for her five-month-old daughter and had planned to return from Perth for her father’s 70th birthday and Christmas when she logged in Sunday on the government-run isolation website.
Anyone boarding a flight to New Zealand will need to provide intelligent proof that they have booked a seat in a secluded and controlled hotel, and Everett said there were originally many dates to decide.
Ten hours later, he reconnected and there was no room left before Christmas.
“It’s like an abandoned giant because I came to the conclusion that I was in a position to leave. I was in a position to do the isolation and had arranged everything here in Perth. So all this, overnight, collapsed,” he said. Said.
The country has 32 remote controlled hotels that can accommodate another 6,260 people at a time, allowing for a 24-hour response time and deep cleaning between guests.
A security spokeswoman for isolation and quarantine said there had been “a short-term increase in arrivals,” that no further reservations can be made between November 12 and November 23 and December 12.
“The truth is that there are a limited number of rooms available. New Zealanders can still move from home, however anyone who needs to get home before the Christmas break has to plan their arrival early, in a different way, they may not be able to do so. come home on the dates they like. “
Everett said the brutality with which the reserved formula is “devastating. “
I planned to be in the country for three months.
“I’ve heard of sports groups, cricket groups booking hotelsArray . . . I find it absolutely unfair when they bring sports stars who are not Kiwi citizens to see their families,” he said.
Another woman trapped in Singapore, Aziela Cheong, said getting a controlled isolation point and a flight at the same time was a matter of luck.
She is waiting to know if her critical target visa application will be approved so she can meet her fiancé in New Zealand.
If approved, it foresees a complicated war to return to the country.
“If you get a controlled isolation space on December 15, it means you have to take a flight and land in New Zealand on the 15th, but you probably wouldn’t have a flight on the 14th, not even the 13th or the 12th . . . there are only a limited number of flights in a week,” he says.
For Tess Whitehouse, a New Zealander living in the UK, the latest frustration about a controlled isolation system, she said, “doesn’t seem to be working for most people. “
A few months ago, he booked flights to see his circle of relatives at Christmas for the first time since 2015.
She hoped it would be less complicated, not more complicated, to enter the country in December, but she has been held to make other plans and hopes to have to cancel tickets because she cannot afford the solitary confinement fee, or more than 3 weeks without work.
“The plan and the hope of having a circle of family members at Christmas and that develops in combination in the summer. Instead, we’ll be remote in winter on the other side of the planet,” he said.
The government said it would not expand its controlled isolation formula to accommodate more people at Christmas, because “the restriction is not hotels, but the must-have for returnees. “
“We want nurses, infantrymen and police to run those facilities, and it’s a limited workforce,” the spokesman said.
“We ask others to be flexible and if there are no positions to perform in controlled isolation on the date they like, check to see if there are positions available on any other date ahead. “
Rnz