Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Associate Minister of Health): What a day where we can look forward to a future with our Anzac comrades with confidence and optimism about the future. We have confidence in our trans-Tasman bubble and the Australian systems that will keep us safe and in our New Zealand systems and today I want to talk more about that. But before I do I want to say welcome to Australian visitors that will come to New Zealand when the trans-Tasman bubble opens.I'm from the South Island—from Te Ānau—and I know that many there are looking forward to welcoming visitors back to New Zealand. I hope Australians consider visiting Fiordland National Park. Even during what's traditionally been the off season the national park and its waterfalls are particularly good to see during winter when there's more rainfall. Also in Queenstown and Wānaka the ski fields have a commodity that is missing in Australia—or at least in shorter supply—which is snow. I hope Australian colleagues will take the time to visit our ski fields.But what is it that makes our quarantine-free travel bubble with Australia safe? Well the overarching consideration is that we have a partner we can trust. We know the Australians have good testing systems and strong reporting of COVID—we can rely on their data. We know they use accurate testing methods. Their response is a very strong one and it has closely followed ours across the last year. We also have a framework for dealing with outbreaks. This includes how we would respond should there be any cases in Australia and it mirrors the alert level system we have in New Zealand so people planning travel can consider that there'll be roughly similar responses to a case in Australia to the types of responses we've mounted to cases here. For example cases that are clearly linked to the border where reliable contact tracing information is quickly obtained would not necessarily require disruption to travel. However those that are more complicated where it's not clear and may reflect community transmission—i.e. the case is unlinked to the border—may require a short pause in the travel bubble. Similarly travel may be suspended if there is a larger outbreak or multiple unlinked cases and a longer period of time is required to understand what is going on.What does this mean for travellers? It means that this is not a return to pre - COVID19 travel. It means that in order to make sure that New Zealand is safe from outbreaks of COVID-19 travellers will need to take extra precautions. That means being prepared for disruption in case they are unable to return. It may mean if they are in Australia in a hot spot that they may need a pre-departure test before they return to New Zealand. It may also mean that if they have returned to New Zealand from a place that has subsequently been shown to be a site of COVID transmission they may need to isolate in New Zealand and that may be self-isolation or in managed isolation depending on the risk.That means we have to take the approach of flyer beware and people need to be prepared for disruption during travel. That means thinking about how you would look after yourself if you were required to shelter in place for a time while there. And people have also been warned that insurance may not cover their travel so it is not a return to business as usual.Contact tracing arrangements between our two countries are also a really important way of keeping New Zealand safe during this time. Travellers to Australia from New Zealand must use the local state contact tracing app when they are there. The country's apps are not interoperable. Similarly visitors to New Zealand will be asked to download the New Zealand contract tracer app and instructed on how to use it. Contact details from travellers are available through a number of sources and that can be accessed by our finding service should we need to trace back following an outbreak in Australia.I recently gave a speech to the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases specialists about our COVID-19 response. Of course in many ways Australia and New Zealand's responses are very similar and we reflected on that. One of the key things relates to our testing regimes. Both countries have some of the highest rates of COVID-19 negativity in their tests done in the world. That reflects our similar approach to managing COVID19: trying to drive the number of cases down to zero. What that means is that we are looking for a needle in a haystack so we have high testing rates and low positivity numbers. And what that means is that we can have high confidence in Australia as a partner for this quarantine-free travel.Finally you've heard of arrangements for making sure that travel itself doesn't become a vehicle for transmission. We'll be making sure that travellers to New Zealand wear masks on the aeroplanes and that green and red zones are separated at airports and that airports undergo infection prevention and control reviews. The quarantine-free travel zone also gives us the opportunity to reconsider how we use managed isolation. And I think this is important because the managed isolation system is a very difficult system to run—doing a very important job. It has facilitated the return of over hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders but there are also risks in running managed isolation facilities and we have been open about the fact there have been some instances of in-facility transmission that has led to community transmission. It is a risk. And over the course of the response we've learnt more about the situations in which this has happened—in particular the evidence for airborne spread of COVID-19 has become more clear over time. That's meant that we have rolled out audits of the ventilation and learnt more about the different facilities that we are using and their suitability as managed isolation facilities. That means when we think about the capacity in managed isolation that is freed up from having quarantine-free travel with Australia we can make some decisions that lower the risk profile in managed isolation overall.Firstly this means we can keep some reserved capacity in case there are outbreaks that mean we need to isolate travellers from Australia in New Zealand in managed isolation facilities. But secondly we have some ability to think about the overall risk profile of people in managed isolation. I think it would raise risk in our managed isolation system overall if we filled up the places that are currently used by people from low-risk countries from people visiting from places where there is high transmission intensity. So another positive aspect of this trans-Tasman bubble is the ability to think more strategically about the managed isolation system.And the managed isolation system has attracted the question: why don't we have purpose-built quarantine facilities?Chris Bishop: Yeah good question!Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: It is a good question to which one cannot magic up a purpose-built quarantine facility during a pandemic at short notice. But also I ask those who pose that question—I have worked in a hospital that is a purpose-built facility with respiratory isolation wards and these are wards where we have negative pressure rooms where the air is sucked out so that bacteria and viruses leave via the HEPA-filtered system—Simon Court: Yep. I've been a patient there.Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: I was not your doctor—and each room has an anteroom and the staff that work on these respiratory wards are particularly trained in prevention control. And yet transmission and transmission of COVID happens in these types of facilities. It has happened in New Zealand. It has happened all around the world. So while it is important that we continue to focus on options for improving the facilities in which we quarantine people we should also understand that there is no easy solution here and we need to think carefully about how we balance the risk across the system as a whole.Simon Court: Vaccines!Hon Dr AYESHA VERRALL: We're doing that too. While I don't want to offend the 18000 people living in Palau the quarantine-free travel zone between Australia and New Zealand is unique in the world—countries of this size being able to travel freely without risk of COVID. This was reported in Al Jazeera BBC and The New York Times because of precisely how unique travel without risk is now. The fact that we have a quarantine-free travel bubble shows confidence in our systems and Australia's systems.