A pre-covid world: a day in new zealand
By Jadenne Radoc Cabahug
Transcription:
I’m Kushil McPherson.
I am Fijian Australian. Born and raised in Fiji, and only moved to New Zealand last year.
I’m at the University of Auckland, I’m at law school at the moment.
I’ll take you through my day yesterday because I didn’t do anything today. I'm living in the halls of residence. So I'm just down the road from school. It is probably like a 15 minute walk up the hill.
I'm going to give you a ballpark number, but it's going to be wrong. But I think there's like 20,000 people in the uni. So the campus is very huge, it's very spread out all over different buildings.
It's like a pre-COVID world. So you just walk around, there's no masks. Some people have hay fever, because it's autumn and it's a weird temperature, the sun's out the breeze, it's cold, it's the whole thing. But people have hay fever. So that's why they wear masks. But otherwise, it's nothing and you just go into lecture theatres.
You just sit in your very crowded lecture halls and do your lectures and you study in the study rooms, and you just come back. And if you want to go to the CBD, which is just a 10 minute walk from my campus, you can and you can get a coffee, you can go out for dinners.
I’m Kushil McPherson.
I am Fijian Australian. Born and raised in Fiji, and only moved to New Zealand last year.
I’m at the University of Auckland, I’m at law school at the moment.
I’ll take you through my day yesterday because I didn’t do anything today. I'm living in the halls of residence. So I'm just down the road from school. It is probably like a 15 minute walk up the hill.
I'm going to give you a ballpark number, but it's going to be wrong. But I think there's like 20,000 people in the uni. So the campus is very huge, it's very spread out all over different buildings.
It's like a pre-COVID world. So you just walk around, there's no masks. Some people have hay fever, because it's autumn and it's a weird temperature, the sun's out the breeze, it's cold, it's the whole thing. But people have hay fever. So that's why they wear masks. But otherwise, it's nothing and you just go into lecture theatres.
You just sit in your very crowded lecture halls and do your lectures and you study in the study rooms, and you just come back. And if you want to go to the CBD, which is just a 10 minute walk from my campus, you can and you can get a coffee, you can go out for dinners.
But it's amazing to think that we can do that. But we still forget that other people are going through the things where they can't. Because we're pretty free here.
It's just it's really, it's lovely. It's really nice. And we're just really proud that everyone respected each other enough to actually stay inside.
There are people who go clubbing, all the clubs are open, all bars are open, everything like that is completely up and open, all the gyms, and that's all open. Everything is just completely normalized, it's completely normal.
That's basically a life in New Zealand and you can pretty much do what you want, as long as you do it safely.
Everyone did their part. And everyone stayed home, they wore their masks, they didn't go out unless it was essential.
We have a little saying and it was like kia kaha, which means stay strong, which is a Maori saying and will like we have after our family. So they call each other like fondo which is family in Maori. So we really incorporated all of the central ideas of Maori culture and language into our actions as a country to try to keep each other safe to make sure once included and just everyone just did it really well and I'm really proud of how everyone handled things here.
A video of a mall in New Zealand in 2021, no masks, no social distancing. Via Kushil McPherson.
The only way that we even know COVID is in this country is when we have to wear a mask on public transport, because that's still a thing, and we have to sign QR codes everywhere we go.
It’s called N Zed QR Scanner and you put in your contact details, your address, and they put in your healthcare number as well, if you were at a place and you didn’t realize this but somebody was there, and they happen to contract the virus, and you just happened to be there, you will get a notification on your phone through the app saying be careful, you were here on this day, self isolate, or be tested
We do that for everywhere we go because if you contract COVID, everyone knows exactly where you've been at the times you've been in the days you've been and they know how to take care of themselves.
And that's it.
It’s called N Zed QR Scanner and you put in your contact details, your address, and they put in your healthcare number as well, if you were at a place and you didn’t realize this but somebody was there, and they happen to contract the virus, and you just happened to be there, you will get a notification on your phone through the app saying be careful, you were here on this day, self isolate, or be tested
We do that for everywhere we go because if you contract COVID, everyone knows exactly where you've been at the times you've been in the days you've been and they know how to take care of themselves.
And that's it.