: The Delta Variant Is Forcing New Zealand To Find a Safe Way Out of Its ‘Zero-COVID’ Strategy #WorldNEWS For much of the pandemic, Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 response has ranked as one

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The Delta Variant Is Forcing New Zealand To Find a Safe Way Out of Its ‘Zero-COVID’ Strategy #WorldNEWS
For much of the pandemic, Aotearoa New Zealand’s COVID-19 response has ranked as one of the best in the world. We have been living in a parallel world, one of a small handful of countries to follow an elimination strategy. That strategy has meant that we have had very few COVID-19 cases and deaths. And when I say very few, I mean it. Until August this year, there had been just over 2,800 confirmed cases and 26 deaths. We have lived much of the pandemic with daily life almost unrestricted. As someone who follows the global situation closely it has been surreal. I’ve spent much of this pandemic worried that New Zealanders were becoming complacent to the threat posed by COVID-19. Then in the middle of August, the delta variant arrived from Australia. In a little over two months our confirmed cases have risen to over 4,700 and two more people have died. Now we’re beginning to experience what happens when delta and inequality collide.
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New Zealand’s first confirmed case, reported on Feb. 28, 2020, came via Iran. Less than a month later, a state of emergency had been declared and our borders closed to all but New Zealand citizens and permanent residents. At the time, there had been less than 30 confirmed COVID-19 cases, all in people traveling to New Zealand from overseas. But by March 25, that number had grown to 205 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including the first with no link to international travel. At 11:59 p. m. that day, the whole country began one of the world’s strictest lockdowns. The majority of New Zealand’s 5 million residents stayed at home, many supported by a government wage subsidy scheme. People were only allowed out for grocery shopping, medical appointments, and exercise.
Read more: Inside One of the Worlds Longest Lockdowns
We emerged from lockdown 11 weeks later, on June 9, with no active COVID-19 cases. The only restrictions that remained were those at the border. Government officials and public servants spent the lockdown scaling up our capacity to do PCR testing and contact tracing. They also established a hotel quarantine system managed by the New Zealand Defense Force, where international arrivals spend their first 14 days in the country. Our first brush with COVID-19 had resulted in a total of 1,154 confirmed cases and 22 deaths.
Since June 2020 a force of thousands has worked hard to keep the virus at bay at New Zealand’s border. No system is perfect, so we’ve had incursions. But each time our ‘go hard and early’ approach of using lockdowns, wastewater testing, and genomic sequencing alongside PCR testing, contact tracing, and isolation of all cases and contacts, has quickly seen us get back to elimination.

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