Kerre McIvor: Charlotte Bellis is another example of the tragedy of MIQ

Yet again, the cruel and unnatural Hunger Games-style MIQ lottery has been in the spotlight. This time because a high profile journalist has been denied permission to return home so she can have her baby.  
Christchurch native and former journalist at Al Jazeera, Charlotte Bellis, has made headlines around the world after she revealed that the Taliban offered her asylum in Afghanistan - when New Zealand refused to allow her in.  
You can just imagine the tabloids take on that. But her’s is just another example of the hurt, the frustration, the fury, the tragedy of an unnecessary system.  
MIQ could be justified when Covid was an unknown. When there was no vaccine.  When people didn't know what they were dealing with and when Covid wasn't in the community. It's here.  
Both Delta and Omicron variants are doing the rounds in this country and there has finally been an acceptance - if not from the PM, at least from Chris Hipkins and Grant Robertson - that we have to learn to live with Covid.  
Contact tracing is a farce - the PM found out she was a close contact of an Air New Zealand flight attendant a week after she flew from Kerikeri to Auckland. A week's a long time in politics and during that time she was out and about doing what a PM should be doing. 
As ACT leader David Seymour says if they can't trace the PM in a week, perhaps it's time to relax the isolation rules for everyone else.  Quite right.  
I had a friend on that flight and I was the one who had to tell her she too was a close contact. Nobody from the Ministry had been in touch - and yet there's a passenger manifest.  She's hardly the Scarlet Pimpernel - she would have been quite easy to contact.  But nope. Not a dicky bird. 
We're a small country. We're a mobile country - when we're not locked down. Deem us all close contacts. Accept that it's inevitable that someone we know, sometime soon, will get Omicron. 
Understand that that is not a death sentence - most people will barely know they have it. Get on with life - and let New Zealanders come home, pregnant, not pregnant, young, old. Let this unjustifiable farce finally end.

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