Ruminations: Confronting Delta in New Zealand

"At the moment, it's not totally beyond hope that New Zealand could control its new cluster, but the odds are against it"
"In a very short space of time, they could be trying to slow the spread and flatten the curve just as Britain was more than a year ago."
"All power to New Zealand for keeping deaths so low, but the issue is that if your policy fails and you haven't got anything else in place, it will be as bad as if you had let it rip right from the start. New Zealand could find all the sacrifices of the past year wasted if they do not get their population immunized quickly enough."
Paul Hunter, professor of health protection, University of East Anglia

"The government is realizing it can't go another year without opening up, but it can't do that without a high level of vaccination and societal license."
"It's a lot easier to lock down than to open up."
"Meanwhile, the tech sector is crying out for high quality labour that can't get into the country, and the hospitality sector is crying out for imported labour. These sectors are hurting and they can't take advantage of New Zealand's position."
Sir Peter Gluckman, former chief scientific adviser, director of the Koi tu Centre for Informed Studies, New Zealand

"Early on in the outbreak, New Zealand was a great example of how you could deal with the virus through lockdowns and social distancing."
"We have to accept that now we've moved on from that. It's incredibly difficult to secure your borders forever, and the only thing New Zealand is left with is vaccination, otherwise they are pretty much fighting a losing battle because you are always going to have the virus knocking on your door."
Professor Jonathan Ball, expert on emerging viruses, University of Nottingham

Wellington, New Zealand, during lockdown last week.

Credit...Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

New Zealand, as of a number of countries able to defend themselves from the onslaught of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, because like them, it represented a castle with a watery moat surrounding it for defence purposes, cloistered itself from the potential of infection from outsiders, with closed borders. There was no emphasis on inoculating its population against the infectious virus, only keeping it at bay, until presumably, it would 'give up' and 'go away'. But it never did, and was highly unlikely to do so, in its ongoing revisiting of previously successful countries suddenly assailed by a more virulent strain of what they had previously evaded.

So few New Zealanders have been vaccinated against COVID, an estimated 80 percent, not inoculated, are now vulnerable to the hugely infectious Delta strain doing its geographic rounds and successfully leaving an island nation suddenly finding itself confronting the variant. There is no demographic which had been naturally exposed to COVID with useful antibodies against re-infection, much less the greater numbers susceptible to infection, never vaccinated. The island has become a proverbial sitting duck.

Scientific circles now look in on the dilemma facing the country with the plunging popularity of its Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, now on the horns of a predictable dilemma. So confident in locking away the island from outside infection it was thought by the country's medical authorities that there would be no need to inoculate the public against a virus whose presence would be receding. Only, of course, that's not what happened; the virus has come roaring back in a more infectious variant.

Ardern saw no help for it but to once again re-impose another lockdown; no longer is New Zealand COVID-free. Not that it has yet been completely overrun with cases, they're still in low numbers albeit rapidly advancing. Yet on the other hand, to remain in isolation is to ensure that its declining economy has nowhere else to go but down, and yet further down, its surpluses enjoyed in the years before COVID now a dim memory.

In its favour still, is that it is an island with natural protection afforded by surrounding seas, that it is relatively sparsely populated, that a start has been made on inoculation, with confidence that by the end of December the majority of New Zealanders will have been vaccinated. The concern remains, however, that despite its tiny death toll resulting from the past year-and-a-half's protective measures the future may reveal some unexpected turns with deaths in the thousands reflecting its over-reliance on isolation and lack of focus on vaccination.