How It Felt to Hit Zero Covid Cases and Come Out of Lockdown
By: Jon Bell
Tags: Lockdown, Newzealand, Covid

How It Felt to Hit Zero Covid Cases and Come Out of Lockdown

Here’s New Zealand’s timeline with Covid:

28 February 2020: Our first case of Covid

25 March: Very aggressive, country-wide, month-long lockdown

27 April: Restrictions relaxed slightly

13 May: Restrictions relaxed further

1 June: Everything other than border restrictions back to normal

The broad brush strokes of New Zealand’s reaction have been pretty well reported. And as you can imagine, we were thrilled to have handled things well. But as hard as lockdown was, some kiwis found themselves dreading going back to “normal life.” Here are two threads from the time that highlighted what a lot of Kiwis were thinking through:

Anyone else feel like the Lockdown has highlighted a broken life?

Why life after Covid-19 has to be different

Many people seemed to go from “we did it!” to “oh crap, now I have to commute again. And oh yeah, I hate my job. And I should probably break up with my partner. And my life isn’t healthy or sustainable. And for some reason I think I might have actually preferred lockdown.”

It probably seems insane that coming out of lockdown somehow made us more anxious and less happy, but it wasn’t an uncommon feeling. It’s like that saying that a hungry person only has one problem, but a full person has many. Once Kiwis could get over the trauma of Covid, we were free to be anxious about a whole lot of other stuff. And there was a lot to be anxious about, like heading back to the office and dealing with all the side effects that traditional office life brings.

At my job, the leadership put up a poll asking if people wanted to work from home all the time, some of the time, or not very often. I assume leadership — full of extroverts, client meetings, fancy lunches, and in-person strategy sessions — assumed the poll would give permission to require everyone in the office five days a week, just like before. That’s not what happened at all.

By my recollection, the vast majority of people not directly connected to the leadership team requested between 50% and 100% remote work. A consensus seemed to emerge around the watercooler: not having a commute is amazing, the office is noisy and distracting, and in-person meetings should be the exception, not the default. Plus in the single month we were in lockdown, a lot of people’s home lives had changed. Different people were in charge of the kids. Partners needed the car. People’s financial situations were different. Flexibility was much more than important than returning to the status quo.

In my neck of the woods, there seemed to be a tension between companies eagerly wanting to go back to exactly the way things used to be, and the employees saying “not so fast.” It was a stressful time, one with a lot of self-reflection and negotiation. Not just between managers and employees but also between partners and friends. There was a realignment.

Every country will experience this transition differently. But you might experience some of what we did. One day you’ll reach a point where your company (or friend, or collaborator, or anyone else in your life) will be able to reasonably ask you to jump right back to how things were in 2019. The same commute, the same amount of in-person meetings, the same expectations as from before Covid. It’s worth asking what you’ll do when that day comes. A lot of things have changed, but things can also change back. And we learned that not everything was better before the Covid lockdown.