Covid Reality Arrives For Kiwis as 'Fortress New Zealand' Falls

Two years after the pandemic began, New Zealanders are finally facing its reality. After keeping the virus at bay for so long, Covid-19 is now tearing through the nation’s population courtesy of the highly infectious omicron variant. In the space of two weeks, new case numbers exploded from less than 1,000 a day to more than 22,000. “Psychologically it’s quite a big shock because to date the pandemic has been largely something that’s happened to other people,” said Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health at the University of Otago. “Until recently, the only people I knew who got infected with the virus lived overseas.”