New Zealanders heading home face delays and quarantine lottery as borders reopen

New Zealanders trying to return home are facing a queue tens of thousands of people long, as the country reopens bookings to cross the border.

The country’s borders have been strictly controlled since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic – only citizens, permanent residents and a handful of essential workers can enter, and all of them must make a booking to spend two weeks in government-controlled managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ).

Demand for those spaces has vastly outpaced supply, with some hopeful returnees spending weeks refreshing the MIQ website, employing “MIQ assistants” or using bots to assist them in securing a space.

The scale of the problem facing those trapped overseas has now been revealed for the first time, as the government opened a “lobby” system for booking quarantine spaces, showing where people are in the queue. Many took to social media to express their frustration, posting screenshots showing thousands of people ahead of them.

The country’s Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment confirmed that 31,800 people were in the queue on Monday, and 5,364 of them had secured vouchers for rooms. The vouchers were released at 9am and all were gone within two and a half hours.

“I know many thousands of people missed out on vouchers in today’s release,” the joint head of MIQ, Megan Main, said.

“I want to reassure people that there are several thousand vouchers still to be released through to the end of the year,” Main said. “They will get other chances. There will be another large release of a few thousand vouchers early next week and there may also be another smaller one later this week.”

The government paused all new releases of quarantine rooms during the latest outbreak of Covid-19, and only began releasing rooms again on Monday.

New Zealand is still battling to crush the Delta variant outbreak. A lockdown has managed to reduce case numbers to about 11-24 a day but has not yet eliminated community transmission completely.

On Monday the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced that Auckland, the centre of the outbreak, would move out of its level 4 lockdown into level 3 restrictions, which allow socially distanced services such as takeaway food, at midnight yesterday. The rest of the country is at level 2 – no longer in lockdown but with some restrictions on gathering size and mask-wearing.

New Zealand reported 14 new cases yesterday, all but one of which were linked to existing infections. There are now 1,085 cases in the outbreak, 790 of which have recovered.

In total, 71.6% of New Zealand’s eligible population (those aged 12 and over) have had at least one dose of Covid-19 vaccine and 37.8% are fully vaccinated.

Yesterday, Ardern announced fines would increase for those caught breaching the rules. On-thespot infringement notices for an individual would increase to a maximum of NZ$4,000 (£2,050) and NZ$12,000 for companies, while fines imposed by the courts would increase to a maximum of NZ$12,000 for individuals and NZ$15,000 for companies.

“Throughout our Covid work, our success has been really based on the fact that people by and large have been really compliant, and it’s meant on a number of occasions now we’ve been able to manage the virus successfully. However, there has been the odd person who has broken the rules and put others at risk,” Ardern said.