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Some wealthy Bay Area residents have reportedly fled to their New Zealand bunkers

By Katie Dowd

A handful of rich Americans have reportedly bugged out in the most luxurious possible way — fleeing to their New Zealand bunkers to wait out the coronavirus pandemic.

For years, wealthy businessmen and tech executives have reportedly been building underground shelters in the small island nation. They're hardly the dank bunkers of your imagination, however. The luxury redoubts have in-home theaters, shooting ranges and, of course, personal gyms.

Mihai Dinulescu, who lives in the Bay Area and was working on founding a cryptocurrency startup, told Bloomberg he got on one of the last flights from SFO to Auckland before the New Zealand shut down international travel to slow the spread of COVID-19.

"The entire international section of [SFO] was empty — except for one flight to New Zealand," Dinulescu told Bloomberg. "In a time when pretty much all planes were running on a third occupancy, this thing was booked solid."

The Bloomberg article also tells of an unnamed "Silicon Valley executive" who had to call his survival-shelter manufacturer for instructions on how to open the underground bunker's door; he'd never done it before. Others have gone to a luxury bunker community in South Dakota.

It's worth noting that local New Zealand media couldn't confirm the existence of the specific bunkers written about in the Bloomberg story, some of which allegedly cost up to $8 million to build and have secret escape tunnels. But there have been a number of trend stories over the past few years about Silicon Valley execs setting up pandemic-ready pleasure palaces in New Zealand. Famously — and with a great deal of local backlash — PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel got New Zealand citizenship in order to snap up a substantial amount of land.

Compared to the United States, which has over 770,000 cases of the coronavirus (about 235 cases per 100,000 people), New Zealand has 1,440 confirmed cases (29 per 100,000) and only 12 deaths. Over 40,000 Americans have now died from COVID-19-related causes.

New Zealand's bunker builders are not the only interlopers to rub locals the wrong way. The Washington Post reported Monday that entertainment mogul David Geffen and other wealthy out-of-towners are ruffling feathers in the French Riviera for a gated compound with its own coronavirus testing center.