People queue to enter a supermarket in Auckland today.Jason Oxenham / AP
New Zealand's success in the fight against covid-19 was interrupted this Tuesday afternoon with the detection of the first case of community transmission since February. A 58-year-old man has tested positive in the city of Auckland, the largest in the country, and has set off all the alarms. In just a few hours, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has appeared before the country to announce the immediate home confinement of the entire population, which will be applied for at least three days throughout the country, seven in the case of the Auckland region. The New Zealand executive assumes that it is the delta variant of covid-19, although the results of the genetic analyzes of the virus will not be known until Wednesday. "Attacking fast and hard has worked for us in the past," Ardern told the media."To beat the delta variant we have to fight even harder," he added.
Shortly after the press appearance, all mobile phones in the country have emitted at maximum volume the alarm signal sent by the National Emergency Service, the same system that is activated in case of earthquakes or tsunamis, with the following message: " A community case of covid-19 has been identified. Stay home and follow the Alert level 4 guidelines. So we can stop the spread of covid-19 and save lives. " Alert level 4 (the maximum in the fight against the virus) means that only essential services can remain open and citizens must stay home and limit contact to members of their household. They can only go out for essential shopping and exercise, as long as they wear a mask.
Jacinda Ardern had already warned New Zealanders that she would take swift and strict action if the arrival of the delta variant in New Zealand was detected.
The country's borders have been closed since March 2020 and the executive has declared its intention to keep them shielded at least until the beginning of 2022. Although the media have coined the nickname “Fortress New Zealand” to describe the situation in the country, the The majority of the population supports the Prime Minister's decisions, as they have managed to keep the covid out of the territory.
The pandemic has only caused 26 deaths in a country of almost five million people.
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Ardern not only gambles its remarkable political prestige if the delta variant is dispersed throughout the country. The vaccination program in New Zealand started much later than in Europe due to the delay in the arrival of the Pfizer vaccine, the only one that has been distributed so far. The general population did not begin to immunize until May, so only 22% of New Zealanders have received both doses of the vaccine. Precisely last week the Prime Minister announced the acceleration of the immunization schedule due to the advance of the virus in Australia. The detection of a possible case of the delta variant has ignited the opposition, which for months has accused the Government of endangering New Zealanders with the slowness and ineffectiveness of its vaccination program
It is not the first time that Jacinda Ardern decrees an “express” confinement upon the detection of a few cases of the disease. But this time the machinery to crush the virus has been put into motion much faster and more forcefully. The Labor government has made this decision because if the worst is confirmed, New Zealand will no longer be counted among the few shelters in the world that are considered free of the delta variant of the covid. Until very recently, so was neighboring Australia, but at the beginning of June its good run ended with the appearance of the first Delta case in the community. Confinements and restrictions have not prevented the advance of this highly infectious strain in this country.
This 2021 there have been three “express” lockdowns in New Zealand. All have ended with a happy ending and the image of Jacinda Ardern defeating, time and again, the pandemic. The prime minister has prepared all the artillery at her disposal to crush the delta variant, as she is fully aware that, if it gets out of control, the virus has the ability to saturate the country's health system and especially its limited capacity for intensive medicine, with only 5.5 intensive care units per 100,000 inhabitants.