Wellington, New Zealand: New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern defended her “Covid zero” elimination strategy Thursday amid fears an epidemic of the highly transmissible Delta variant has rendered the previously successful policy ineffective.
A Delta case emerged in Auckland last week, ending a six-month run without local transmission in New Zealand, one among the world’s last Covid-free zones.
That infection has since ballooned into the most important cluster the country has recorded throughout the whole pandemic, with 277 cases.
Ardern said she believed even the Delta strain could again be stamped call at the community and health experts were advising her to stay with the elimination approach.
“In their view, it isn’t only possible, it remains the simplest strategy and that i totally agree,” she said Thursday after announcing 68 new community cases.
Her Australian counterpart Scott Morrison in the week said it had been “just absurd” to undertake to eliminate Delta, adding: “New Zealand can’t do this .”
Australia pursued a Covid-zero policy for about 18 months, but runaway Delta outbreaks mean some authorities there are now talking more about containment than elimination.
The New Zealand Herald in the week asked if Ardern was “chasing rainbows” trying to quash Delta and even her Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins conceded it raised “big questions” about the policy’s effectiveness.
Ardern said she was “not fussed” by such concerns, pointing to the success of an epidemic response in New Zealand which has resulted in only 26 deaths among a population of 5 million.
“We wanted to save lots of people’s lives, and that we have; We wanted to undertake to possess people’s lives lived as normally as possible, and we’ve had a number of the shortest periods of restrictions of any country,” she said.
“And we wanted to save lots of jobs and therefore the economy, with the economy running at pre-Covid levels, we’ve done that too.”
Ardern said Delta had forced tweaks to the elimination strategy — like a faster national lockdown and more extensive testing — but it had been still a legitimate goal.
She said New Zealand could examine alternative policies when it improved vaccination rates, which are currently among rock bottom within the developed world, with about 20 percent of the population fully inoculated.
“No one wants to use lockdowns forever which isn’t our intention… except for now, while we vaccinate, elimination is that the goal and that we can roll in the hay ,” she said.
