MIQ constraints

The MIQ system faces a lot of constraints against scaling up and it's not always easy to tell which constraint is most binding.

One of the constraints, as I understand it, is health support around facilities in case of cases that are discovered in isolation. So, suppose you could stand up an isolation facility in a spot that didn't have quite as good access to hospitals and the like. Would you want that facility in the system?

I understand that the Ministry of Health has taken a fairly on/off view of risk: if there's risk, then it's not allowed. But that could have us missing some tricks.

Here's one trick we could be missing.

Suppose that a potential facility has surrounding health support in the area sufficient to cover 2 expected cases per fortnight. If it brings in 100 people per fortnight from places where 1% of the population have Covid, it'll be halfway to hitting that wall - and since you probably need a safety buffer in there, it'll be ruled out.

But different places have different risks. 

New Zealand is getting very large numbers of people coming in from India, where Covid numbers are very high. It would be a mistake to put a lot of people travelling from India into facilities where health services might be stretched. But Taiwan has basically no cases. It's silly that they're required to go through MIQ at all. But if they're going to go through MIQ at all, does it make sense to put visitors from Taiwan in rooms that are in places that have tons of 'just in case' support, or should we consider having facilities in places with less support for people who are less risky?

You could, in that setup, have low-risk travellers (direct flights) from low-risk places go into facilities that are suitable for low-risk visitors. Not every facility needs to be in spots that can handle large numbers of cases. You just need contingency plans for shuttling people over to quarantine in case there are cases that come through. 

There are lots of binding constraints. I'm told that the problem isn't just having enough rooms, it's having enough rooms in places that are able to provide support. And I wonder whether that constraint could be eased through some risk triaging. 

Ponderings here sparked from a note in my reader mailbag today, from a Kiwi trying to get a partner in from Cuba. Since Cuba is not a visa waiver country, there's little hope. But whether a place is a visa waiver country is kinda orthogonal to whether there's high risk of Covid cases there. And I wonder why the changes around admission for the partners of Kiwis is restricted to Visa-wavier countries rather than being a bit more based around riskiness. 

It isn't hard to imagine having a few thousand more spaces open up, under a restriction that they're only suitable for people coming in on direct flights from countries with less than some threshold number of cases per million population. The facility in a place that can only handle 1 case per fortnight could be suitable for travellers coming in from places that have a few hundred cases per million population rather than tens of thousands of cases per million population. 

All the really dark shaded countries are much higher risk than the light shaded ones, though any policy application would need to weight by the credibility of the data. People coming from Australian states with low case numbers could go to new facilities in places that might otherwise have been ruled out, with the high-support facilities saved for folks coming in from riskier places.