New Zealand outlined Thursday, October 28 a plan to reopen its borders, closed for more than eighteen months, amid increasing pressure from its nationals stranded abroad.
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Covid-19 Minister Chris Hipkins has announced that people from Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu and Tokelau, Pacific Islands will be able to travel to New Zealand from November without having to perform a quarantine.
28 deaths from coronavirus in total
This possibility should also come into force, at the beginning of next year, for nationals from countries at low risk of contamination, he added. Hipkins also said that starting in November, the 14-day hotel quarantine currently imposed on anyone arriving from overseas will be reduced to seven days and replaced with home isolation.
He admitted that the border closure has long been a bulwark against the virus but that the appearance in Auckland of the much more contagious Delta variant has been a game-changer. Most of the new infections recorded are now of local origin. "
We are also very aware of the pressure at the borders as the world begins to open up and more and more New Zealanders, here and abroad, wish to see their loved ones again,
" he said. he declares.
Currently, tens of thousands of New Zealanders living abroad are scrambling to book one of the 4,000 hotel rooms reserved for quarantines.
Hipkins said the changes will provide more rooms and the goal is to move to home isolation in the first three months of 2022, when 90% of New Zealand's population will be fully vaccinated.
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He added that no decision has been made on whether the home isolation regime will only apply to nationals returning to New Zealand or whether it will also include foreign travelers. Opposition Covid spokesman Chris Bishop called the plan "the
bare minimum
", saying fully vaccinated arrivals from low-risk countries should not have to be placed in isolation.
“
It is time for us to reopen ourselves to the world.
We cannot stay locked behind the New Zealand fortress walls
, ”he said.
New Zealand has so far recorded just 28 deaths from the coronavirus on its soil and the 5 million people have lived almost normally during much of the pandemic.