A year ago, today, New Zealanders woke up to their country under lockdown. Here 1 NEWS shares the stories of three Kiwis whose lives were changed forever.
By Mei Heron and Abbey Wakefield
For a supermarket worker, an epidemiologist and a woman trying to get home to New Zealand, Alert Level 4 came with a raft of changes to their everyday existence.
We begin with the story of a woman who lost both of her parents last year.
BRIDGET CHAPMAN – KIWI COMING HOME
A Kiwi mother, and a teacher in Mongolia, Bridget Chapman had no idea the curveball the coronavirus pandemic was about to throw her.
A Kiwi teacher in Mongolia, Bridget Chapman travelled home in time to see her sick mother die, then her father passed away during lockdown. (Source: Other)
Early last year, Chapman’s mother had suffered an aneurysm of the aorta, so she desperately wanted to be by her side in New Zealand.
However, at the same time Covid-19 was just starting to make headlines around the world.
After 55 hours in the air and $10,000 later, Bridget and her six-year-old daughter landed in Auckland.
“My daughter didn't take off her mask for 55 hours,” she said.
After arriving on March 5, Chapman went straight to Auckland Hospital, where her mother was being treated.
Tragically, she passed away three days later.
“There was such intense grief,” Chapman said.
Busy planning her mother’s funeral, Chapman moved back into their Whangārei family home and her husband flew from overseas just before the Mongolia border shut.
“He got the last seat, on the last flight,” she said.
Thankfully, the Chapman family were together for her mothers’ funeral.
But, Covid-19 was getting worse and shortly after the funeral, a nationwide lockdown was announced for New Zealand.
It was during lockdown that Bridget faced the “indescribable”.
Weeks after she lost her mother, Bridget’s father didn’t recover from an operation.
“I couldn't go and see him in ICU obviously, yeah, no contact whereas I had been able to be with mum,” she said.
Shortly after being admitted to hospital, Chapman’s father passed away.
“We couldn't be there and let him know how much we loved him,” she said.
Not being able to see her father before he died was a “harrowing” experience for Chapman.
“I had no funeral, no memorial, no nothing,” she said.
At this point in the interview Chapman apologised and started crying.
“We just had to suck it up didn't we, the whole world was going through it,” she said.
During lockdown, Chapman continued teaching her students in Mongolia online.
Suddenly, Chapman had the opportunity to go back to Mongolia to continue teaching. However at the last minute, she “pulled out” and her husband, who is also a teacher, went to Mongolia.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving my family and I didn't know what was happening with the Covid situation in the world and, you know, I had unwell family members and still my children are here," she said.
Now, she’s trying to be reunited with her husband who has now been in lockdown in Mongolia for more than 200 days.
“It's tough not knowing when my husband will get back, we don’t know when the fights out of Mongolia will open. We can't book flights back and so he can't go on the waiting list for quarantine. That’s our next hurdle probably.”
Overall, Bridget said she’s fortunate for the quality family time from lockdown.
“The simple things in life are what are important at the end of the day,” she said.
ALICE DAVIDSON – SUPERMARKET STORE MANAGER
Hamilton Countdown store manager and mother of two Alice Davidson spent eight weeks away from her children and faced abuse from “panicked” customers during Alert Level 4.
Countdown store manager Alice Davidson spent eight weeks away from her children and copped verbal abuse from “panicked” customers during lockdown. (Source: Other)
Countdown says there was a 600% increase in abuse and aggression towards their team through Alert Level 4.
When the nationwide lockdown was announced, Davidson remembers customers were “scared” and queued up right around the store.
“What I did notice that people, their fear was consuming, and it changed their behaviour,” she said.
“There was no stock, we just got cleared out.”
The next day, customers had queued up again, but this time Davidson was verbally abused by one woman.
“She went for me, like yelling in front of the crowd because she needed 2 Litres of milk,” she said.
Shortly afterwards, the abusive customer apologised to Davidson.
“She saw me deal with an assisted customer and came up to me afterwards crying and apologised for her behaviour and that's when it sort of cemented to me that these people, they just were scared,” she said.
While managing the Countdown store, Davidson was also concerned for her two children, who she has joint custody with her ex-husband.
“I realised I had to make a decision about where they would stay during that period of level four,” she said.
Worried about catching Covid-19 as a frontline worker, the decision was made for her children to stay with their father, separated from Davidson.
“It meant that I didn’t have that fear and it meant that I could focus where I needed to here,” she said.
Over the course of lockdown, Davidson’s daughter had her eighth birthday, which she celebrated by decorating the outside of her bedroom with balloons and keeping her distance.
“That physical touch side is something that kids need, and I needed as a mum, so that was tough,” she said.
The Matamata cluster early in the pandemic, Davidson said, was “extremely challenging,” for her Countdown team.
“That was a really scary day, we knew people that had had Covid had possibly visited the store,” she said.
Reflecting on the cluster, Davidson said she just feels fear.
“That's not fear for me, that's fear for how people around me are going to cope in that situation,” she said.
However, despite the challenges that came with lockdown, Davidson said she is grateful for it.
“When I think about that time, I feel extreme grateful, I purposefully choose to think about it like that, it taught me what sort of person I want to be,” she said.
MICHAEL BAKER - EPIDEMIOLOGIST
A Wellington man with a job not many of us knew the definition of 12 months ago, epidemiologist Dr Michael Baker reflects on a year since lockdown.
The Otago University professor says New Zealand could have gone down a track it couldn’t recover from if it hadn’t decided to target zero Covid. (Source: Other)
In early March last year, the Otago University professor became a strong scientific voice calling for stricter lockdowns to keep New Zealanders safe from Covid-19.
“I felt compelled to because, for me, the evidence was so overwhelming this was the right thing to do,” Baker said.
Baker said he “vividly” remembers that time and suffered from “huge anxiety”.
“My own feelings got more and more intense as we moved into March because you could see the virus was transitioning from imported cases to local transmission and we were about to head up that very steep exponential rise,” Baker said.
“I thought New Zealand was heading off the cliff,” he said.
When 1 NEWS interviewed Baker about the virus on March 17 last year, he was so overwhelmed with emotion he walked out to take a break.
Reflecting on that moment, Baker said that’s the only time that ever happened to him.
“I think the thing that holds scientists back is you want to have a high degree of certainty before you say something will work and here was a situation where the certainty was not there, it was at a certain point a judgement about what future scenario we might see if we did this differently,” he said.
The two weeks between that interview and the Government announcing an Alert Level 4 lockdown, Baker described as total exhaustion.
“I was trying to convince the decision makers that we actually did have to take a different path, we did have to aim for zero Covid,” he said.
On March 23, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced that New Zealand would move to Alert Level 3 and then to Alert Level 4 – one of the strictest lockdowns in the world - just 48 hours later.
Baker described that moment as an “amazing sense of relief”.
“I was at my work, there were a lot of physical distancing boundaries broken then, basically we all hugged each other and there were a few tears,” Baker said.
The Prime Minister described the lockdown as “unprecedented” but for Baker the unprecedented work was just beginning.
Over the lockdown period, Baker said he averaged five interviews a day within New Zealand and an international interview every second day.
“According to science media centre, I think I may have been responsible for about one-third of all of the media commentary over the last year,” he said.
Despite being a tough critic of some aspects of the Government’s pandemic response, looking back over the year Baker praises New Zealand’s politicians.
“Amazing credit really in the end to, I think, to our political leaders because they had to make the hard call,” he said.
When asked if he had any regrets, Baker said he felt correct in all his assessments during this extraordinary time.
And he is already looking ahead to life beyond the pandemic, saying he’s concerned about the world our children will live in if we don’t start tackling climate change and growing inequalities.
“It means actually we’ll have to live a different life now if we want to be prepared for those threats on the horizon just like we did with the pandemic,” he says.
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