The 90% Project is an NZ Herald initiative that aims to reach all New Zealanders to get the word out about vaccination so we can save lives and restore freedoms. Video / NZ Herald
Almost two years into the pandemic, few countries have maintained their status as a global Covid-19 success story.
After 12 months of being lauded, Australia came unstuck because of a bungled vaccine rollout and repeated hotel quarantine leaks. Singapore, ready to abandon its long-held zero tolerance approach after vaccinating the majority of its eligible population, has been forced to reinstate restrictions as the highly infectious Delta variant spread and cases climbed.
But in New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had largely managed to keep the virus at bay. Shutting the nation's border in mid-March last year, she introduced compulsory quarantine for all returnees and instituted a series of strict lockdowns to stamp out existing clusters.
The New York Times described the country as "a global standout at fighting the coronavirus", Time wrote that "few would quarrel with Ardern's handling of the pandemic", and The Washington Post wrote of New Zealand's "success story, from lockdown to reopening".
There were fears that "success story" had come to an end on August 17, when Ardern put New Zealand into a national lockdown, after its first coronavirus case in six months – and first encounter with the Delta variant – arrived via a quarantined traveller from across the Tasman.
"Delta has been called a gamechanger, and it is. It means we need to again go hard and early to stop the spread," the PM said when announcing the lockdown.
"We have seen what can happen elsewhere if we fail to get on top of it. We only get one chance."
Sign outside Middlemore Hospital in Auckland. Photo / Michael Craig
Case numbers quickly rose, spreading across three regions, including two of the country's most populous cities. Motorways and streets emptied, shops closed, and New Zealanders disappeared into their homes, waiting with bated breath to find out if past strategies could wipe out Delta.
It turns out that against all odds they may well beat Delta, or at least keep it in check with low numbers. After peaking at 83 cases on August 28, cases have been steadily tracking down, with modellers predicting they should hit single digits in the coming weeks.
"We have managed to contain what was a very large outbreak in Auckland – around 200 to 300 people were infected by the time it was found – and are closing in on eliminating it, although there has been a stubborn tail that has kept ahead of contact tracers over the last week," Shaun Hendy, an epidemic modeller at the University of Auckland's Te Pūnaha Matatini research centre, told news.com.au.
"Auckland remains in lockdown, but restrictions have been substantially relaxed in the rest of the country."
Three things that have made 'the difference against Delta'
There are three main reasons the nation's approach has proved more successful than those in Sydney and Melbourne, where somewhat similar measures have been in place for months, according to epidemiologist and a leading communicator on New Zealand's pandemic response Michael Baker.
The first, Professor Baker told news.com.au, was an "unwavering political commitment to an elimination strategy from the beginning, though now there's a plan to transition to a 'reconnecting' strategy once we have high [90 per cent] vaccine coverage".
The second, was officials' "use of the 'go early go hard' approach when there is evidence of transmission in the community".
More vaccines are set to be on their way to New Zealand to ensure the Covid-19 vaccination roll-out can continue at its current pace. Photo / NZME
"This means rapidly moving to the most stringiest lockdown level – alert level 4 – if ongoing transmission is detected," Professor Baker said.
The final reason, he said, was the "very effective public engagement with the elimination strategy and what is required".
"Also, there is less 'lockdown fatigue' from the New Zealand public because we have spent very little time under lockdown. This is the first national lockdown we have had since eliminating Covid-19 early in 2020," he said.
Moving the country to "its strictest lockdown settings immediately and then gradually relaxing these, rather than ramping them up as the outbreak got worse", has been crucial, as has the speed with which things have been implemented, Professor Hendy agreed.
"In hindsight, we would have been in serious trouble had we not responded that way. By the time it was found, the Auckland cluster was already the largest we had ever dealt with in this pandemic, and cases had spread to Wellington," he said.
"A big difference here is that our national Government controls the response so we don't have state premiers following different paths. It makes both for a more effective co-ordinated response and it has very high public approval.
"And speed was crucial given the rate that the cluster was growing, but it is probably the strictness of the measures that has been the most important. Our lockdown has been much stricter than those used in Sydney and Melbourne or even in Auckland's outbreak last August. This has proved to be the difference against Delta."
'Positive signs that New Zealand will stamp out this outbreak'
Microbiologist and another of New Zealand's central pandemic communicators, Siouxsie Wiles, said that a month since the outbreak began, "things are tracking well".
"The outbreak [has been] confined to the Auckland region and restrictions are loosening around the rest of the country," Wiles told news.com.au.
"[Though] there have been some mystery cases over the last couple of weeks, the majority of these have been linked to existing clusters. The majority of cases are in known contacts and there have been just a few exposure events within the wider community."
"There are positive signs that New Zealand will stamp out this outbreak," he said.
But, both he and Hendy warned: "It's still not certain."
Baker said: "After interrupting exponential increase and flattening the curve, there has been a marked decline in cases. We are now seeing a long tail of cases over the last two weeks, and this could continue for some time."
That tail, Hendy said, "is proving challenging to close off, with household-to-household transmission still taking place in a few suburbs".
"However, the number of cases infectious in the community is slowly falling and contact tracers are sounding increasingly confident that we will close this off in the next few weeks," he said.
The Shot Bro mobile vaccination bus making its first stop in Pukekohe delivering the Covid-19 Pfizer vaccine to harder to reach members of the community. Photo / NZH
"It's possible the Government will be able to relax all domestic restrictions by October."
Vaccination now the key to keeping Delta out
In terms of New Zealand's next steps, "like everywhere else, it's vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate," Wiles said.
"There is talk of pilot experiments to see if there are ways to open up the borders a little more, but until a vaccine is available for children, the data from overseas shows that too many children will end up with 'long covid' or in hospital if community transmission is allowed to happen," she said.
Of those aged 12 and over, 71 per cent have now had at least one dose of the jab, but "the goal will be to push this percentage as high as possible, ideally up into the 90s before relaxing border restrictions, perhaps early in the New Year", Hendy added.
