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GPCAPT Pete Griffin in Indonesia MIDDLE
GPCAPT Nick McMillan and his wife Beth at Japanese garden Kenroku-en, before the global pandemic RIGHT
WGCDR Steve Thornley at Picadilly Station in London at 4.30pm, which would normally be crammed with travellers
Deployed during a Pandemic Home feels a long way away when you’re deployed overseas. Even more so when a pandemic has gripped the world and coming home even for a short holiday is out of the question. Air Force News chatted with some of our Attachés posted abroad to see how different their deployments look now.
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New Zealand Defence Attaché to Japan and the Philippines Group Captain (GPCAPT) Nick McMillan said the first cases emerged in Japan just before the docking of the Diamond Princess cruise ship in early February. At that point there was still much unknown about the virus. “We worked alongside the Australians to get the Kiwis off the ship and repatriated back to New Zealand.”
“For the first few months we operated morning and afternoon shifts so we didn’t have too many people in the Embassy. We enforced mask-wearing, social distancing, and would have meetings via video conferencing as much as possible – even if we were having meetings with others in separate offices within the building.” No Embassy staff member contracted the virus, GPCAPT McMillan said.
In April/May, the Japanese Government requested the voluntary closure of all restaurants, parks and most non-essential shops, but the country’s capital, Tokyo was not locked down like in other countries. GPCAPT McMillan said it was partly because Japanese people tend to be very law-abiding and they were also a mask-wearing society.
“We have staff who are responsible for and look after their elderly parents so we are very mindful of that.”
Because of those factors, transmission levels were “extremely low” in the beginning, he said. But after the State of Emergency was lifted in late May, Japan was hit by a second wave of infections in July/August.
Defence Attaché to Indonesia and Timor-Leste GPCAPT Pete Griffin said transmission cases in Indonesia had been exceedingly high with about 3,000 cases identified daily – a figure considered to be under-reported according to the World Health Organisation.
“The last six months have been surreal and has severely curtailed our ability to do some things. But we now have time to do some of the more strategic work that we might not have had time to do if everything was normal.”
