I now live in NZ and am so glad and thankful that I do. I was on the "wrong" island when the lockdown started but the ferry companies got us all home in a few days.

NZ has the advantage that after the 1919 pandemic they wrote laws that could be swiftly enacted whenever a pandemic hit. These were re-written after the SARS outbreak but not needed at the time, thankfully.

The country has done this before, most notably in 1948 when all children were put into isolation to stop a polio epidemic.

One problem, as it turned out, was that tourists were supposed to self=isolate for 14 days on arrival in the country but THEY DID NOT DO AS THEY HAD PROMISED and spread the bloody plague around. In the end we had to stop trusting people and put the lockdown in place. There is only one case in the country with an unknown origin and that could be linked to a visiting cruise ship without the patient knowing where s/he picked it up.

Now I am about to drive the 10 mins to the beach for my first shoreline walk in over a month.