Welcome step on reopening
New Zealand’s evolving pandemic policy has passed a milestone and faces a new test with the opening of borders yesterday to vaccinated visitors from 60 countries. The group of visa waiver countries includes the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Japan and others in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. It is two weeks since Australian tourists were allowed in, and daily new border cases are below 100.
Yesterday’s move is a big boost for battling tourism operators and brings New Zealand further into line with how many other countries are dealing with Covid-19 — as not an impediment to life in general. Visitors are required to do pre-departure and arrival tests.
It marks a step up in tourist travel with about 30,000 people now arriving each week rather than numbers near that landing each day before the border closure. International students and people on working holidays will be able to come in.
Ideally, the shift would have occurred with New Zealand’s Omicron wave at a satisfyingly low level. Unfortunately, that isn’t yet the case. The country’s seven-day rolling average of Covid cases continues to show drift and a slow glide downwards, rather than a quick drop. More positively, death and hospital rates have gradually been falling.
When combined with the switch from red to orange Covid settings, the situation could be vulnerable to a temporary reverse or potentially a second wave as the weather gets colder.
The Omicron wave could be at least three months long before case numbers once again sink near 1000 — where they were in mid-February.
Modellers say winter could be a danger period for another wave and loosening restrictions could soon push up case numbers. Open borders make it easier for new variants to get in. People can be expected to spend more time indoors, creating conditions for easier spread of the virus. Decreasing immunity and new variants have left populations overseas susceptible to reinfection.
Covid-19 modeller Professor Michael Plank said: “It could be we see a bit of an effect in the change to orange and the relaxation of people’s behaviour. But that’s probably not likely to cause a massive increase in case numbers: it’s more likely to be a bump.”
University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker has said border testing numbers suggested the rate of infection among arrivals was higher than in the community.
Plank said the number of reinfections “we’re getting is going to be an increasingly important indicator. If we start to see a significant increase, that would point to the possibility of a second wave being driven by waning immunity.”
People still need to behave as though the virus is in the community — because it is.
Even so, the latest border move is largely a positive one within the new normality of a more manageable global pandemic.
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