Home Science Auckland, New Zealand, Under Lockdown After 3 Covid-19 Coronavirus Cases Emerge

Auckland, New Zealand, Under Lockdown After 3 Covid-19 Coronavirus Cases Emerge

Auckland, New Zealand, Under Lockdown After 3 Covid-19 Coronavirus Cases Emerge

Three is a little less than 84,717.

The latter is the number of new reported Covid-19 coronavirus cases in the U.S. in just one day, February 13. The former is the number of cases that have emerged in New Zealand over the past three weeks since late January. Three weeks is longer than one day. Nevertheless, three reported Covid-19 cases in New Zealand has been enough for its government to impose a temporary lockdown.

In this case, temporary means only three days. And the lockdown will involve no more than Auckland, not the rest of the country. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced on February 14 that as of 11:59pm that day, the largest city in New Zealand will move into a Level 3 alert. This Reuters video showed the announcement:

The government is trying to make the city dubbed “A Place Desired By Many” into “A Place Not Desired By The Covid-19 Coronavirus.” The lockdown is not going to be the primary response to the virus but more so a time out so that public health officials can figure out where the virus came from and how to re-configure its defenses against the virus.

Level 3 restrictions mean no public venues can remain open. You also gotta stay at home, unless you have to do something essential like shop for toilet paper or shop for food or perhaps shop for toilet paper and food. Essential workers can continue to go to and from work. There can be no gatherings outside homes with the exception of weddings and funerals. Oh, and if you were planning on getting married in front of your closest 10,000 friends in Auckland, yeah-nah. Assuming that you and your future spouse will show up to the wedding and that you are marrying only one other person, you would only be able to invite eight more people to meet the 10-person limit on gatherings. If you are an essential worker, your kids can go to school. But all other kids should stay home.

At the same time, the rest of New Zealand has gone to a Level 2 Alert. That means if you are outside Auckland, you will still be allowed to leave your home and go to work and school. But you would have to maintain a distance of at least two meters in public and in retail stores and one meter in most other places like workplaces, cafes, restaurants and gyms. Two meters is about six feet five inches or Denzel Washington (who is around six feet tall) wearing a top hat. It would also be Denzel with a marmot on his head, a smaller Alpine marmot, assuming that the marmot were not fully standing.

You should also wear face coverings on public transport and when enough physical distancing is not possible. Social gatherings can’t include more than 100 people either. Both the Level 3 Alert in Auckland and the Level 2 Alert elsewhere will remain in place until 12 midnight on Wednesday February 17.

All of these changes were in response to a couple and their daughter in Auckland testing positive for the virus. As Ardern indicated in this 1 News segment, they did test positive for the more infectious B.1.1.7 variant of the the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV2) that first emerged in the U.K.:

These were the first local infections in the country since January 24, which happened to also be Talk Like a Grizzled Prospector Day, if you celebrate it. Before late January, New Zealand had gone over two months without any local infections. New Zealand along with countries such as Taiwan and South Korea has shown that you can actually prevent the spread of the SARS-CoV2 with an organized and effective national response. New Zealand will be commencing vaccinations with the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine on February 20 but hasn’t been pinning all its hopes of controlling the virus on vaccination.

Yep, New Zealand actually has a clear national warning system and a pro-active approach to containing the spread of the SARS-CoV2 before it actually spreads. The U.S. never really established a national warning system for the pandemic, unless you count a President saying something like “we’re rounding the corner on the pandemic” when we really weren’t. In responding to a pandemic, it is really important to get ahead of the virus, to anticipate where it may go before it actually goes there. After all, no coach should say during a football game, “let’s allow the opponents to get a big lead first and then come up with a plan.”

And, of course, it is important to actually take some action against the virus. Arden has maintained the need to “go hard, and go early” when it comes to responding to the pandemic, not “go hardly at all.”

This article is auto-generated by Algorithm Source: www.forbes.com

Related Posts

0

Ad Blocker Detected!

Refresh