New Zealand abandons zero-COVID strategy
AUCKLAND, New Zealand — For a year and a half, New Zealand has pursued a strategy of “COVID zero,” closing its borders and quickly enforcing lockdowns to keep the coronavirus in check, a policy it maintained even as other Asia-Pacific countries transitioned to coexisting with the viral threat.
On Monday, New Zealand gave up the ghost.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern acknowledged an end to the elimination strategy seven weeks into a lockdown that has failed to halt an outbreak of the delta variant, announcing that restrictions would be gradually lifted in Auckland, the country’s largest city.
“We’re transitioning from our current strategy into a new way of doing things,” Ardern told reporters. “With delta, the return to zero is incredibly difficult, and our restrictions alone are not enough to achieve that quickly. In fact, for this outbreak, it’s clear that long periods of heavy restrictions has not got us to zero cases.”
“What we have called a long tail,” she added, “feels more like a tentacle that has been incredibly hard to shake.”
Overall, New Zealand’s approach to the virus has been a spectacular success, giving it one of the lowest rates of cases and deaths in the world, and allowing its people to live without restrictions during most of the pandemic.
But the mood among many in Auckland has soured as the most recent lockdown has stretched on, with thousands of people breaking a stay-at-home order Saturday to demonstrate against the restrictions in the country’s largest such protest of the pandemic.
The country’s vaccination program has also been a source of consternation. The campaign began in earnest only last month, and fewer than half of people 12 and older have been fully vaccinated, leaving New Zealand far behind most developed countries.
Ardern began to acknowledge the public discontent two weeks ago, when she announced, after more than a month of a highly restrictive stay-at-home order, that some rules would be relaxed in Auckland even as much of the lockdown order remained in place. About 200,000 people were allowed to return to work, and restaurants and cafes could reopen for takeout orders.
At the time, Ardern said the country was still trying to eliminate the virus. But to public health researchers, who believed it was still possible to beat delta and who were encouraging New Zealand to stick with the zero-COVID strategy, it was a gamble.
Now, they say, it is clear that easing restrictions ended any chance of wiping out the virus again. New Zealand is still reporting dozens of new cases a day, almost all of them in Auckland, after the latest outbreak began in mid-August.
“The modeling said basically that going into Level 3 was going to be a big risk,” said David Welch, a COVID-19 modeler at the University of Auckland’s Center for Computational Evolution, referring to the move away from Level 4, the highest alert level.
“It’s turned out that elimination is not going to work at Level 3,” he said. “That’s not that surprising, just because delta is so transmissible. The question now is: Will Level 3 be enough to contain it with less than 20, 30, 40, 50 cases a day for a while?”
A more permissive approach, Welch said, could allow the number of cases to rise much higher, letting the outbreak spiral out of control.