Government considers axing Covid traffic lights

The Government could dispense with the traffic light system altogether when it reviews its Covid settings in a “couple of weeks”.

The Ministry of Disabled People has already been consulting on dropping mandates for masks.

New Zealand moved to the traffic light system on December 2 last year. Since then, it has hovered between the red and orange settings and has been at orange since April.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has hinted in recent weeks that the system might be replaced and yesterday implied the whole thing might go.

“We’ve been living with the traffic light system for upwards to a year now — now is the time for us to look at whether all those settings are fit for purpose. We include masks in that.

“We are reviewing our Covid rules. We have a regular process of looking at what our . . . case numbers are.”

Ardern said the Government was not just looking at a review of the traffic light system but at “broader settings more generally”.

The change appears to have been in the works for some time.

Last month, the Prime Minister said that at the time “isolation of cases still matters enormously and that’s why orange remains important”.

But she hinted a change to the traffic lights was on the cards. “In the future . . . we’ve also said that we’ll continue to look at whether or not the traffic light system still continues to provide the framework we need.

“The time and place to do that will be as we come out of winter.”

Ardern said yesterday that no decisions had been made and final advice was still to be delivered.

Covid-19 Response Minister Ayesha Verrall on Thursday said the Government would be getting rid of the traffic light system at the next review of Covid settings. “We’re looking at all of the elements.”

National’s Covid-19 spokesman Chris Bishop said his party wanted to see the system gone altogether.

“It had some vague logic to it but we haven’t stuck to the logic for a long time now,” he said, noting NZ did not appear to be going up and down the traffic light settings in line with risk.

Act leader David Seymour said it was “no longer clear that the remaining interventions, the mask-wearing, the remaining vaccine mandates, are passing a cost-benefit analysis”.

“What we should do is dump the remaining restrictions,” he said.

Individual institutions like aged care would make their own decisions about what rules to implement, Seymour said. “I’m not sure what our isolation rules are adding beyond what we would achieve by people using common sense and staying home when they are ill.”

We’re looking at all of the elements [of the traffic light settings]. Dr Ayesha Verrall