Editorial: The little country that said 'yeah nah' to Covid 19

Enjoy your moment in the sun, you great Kiwi you. Photo / Supplied

Editorial

EDITORIAL

Take a moment today to congratulate yourself, you vaccinated, cautious and kind Kiwi.

There are plenty of tales of how things haven't worked out the best or gone right during our battle with this Covid-19 contagion. It has crushed most parts of the world. Here we sit, pretty bloody good, actually.

Sure, we held our breath in the first outbreak on March 28, 2020 when there were 146 new community cases. And we whistled through our teeth (behind masks, naturally) on November 16 when new cases of the Delta variant hit 222 in a day.

But after each of these scary days, the number of new infections has tailed off.

There have now been three spikes of new cases - the latest being the largest - but daily reports have tracked down again each time. Some of our hearts missed a beat on January 2 when 105 new cases were reported but that turned out to be two days of cases.

With just 19 new cases on Thursday, 35 on Friday and 92 per cent of the eligible population vaccinated, we've put ourselves in the remarkable position of making elimination a long but plausible shot.

Unfortunately, Covid-19 is more wily than even this clever little country at the bottom of the South Seas. University of Canterbury Covid-19 modeller Professor Michael Plank predicts the most infectious variant so far, Omicron, will break out around the week of January 24. We know that the more who are double-vaccinated - and boosted for those with waning protection - the better the outcome.

We have lost 53 people to the pandemic, and each is a tragic death we would have much preferred to avoid.

Still, New Zealand spent from the end of April to the middle of August last year reporting mostly single-figure new Covid cases. And we may be back there again before Omicron breaks through.

That is a remarkable story for the history books and one we should take pride in being a part of right now.