New Zealand removes isolation requirement for Covid patients

New Zealand has removed the last of its remaining Covid restrictions after more than three years of heavy-handed pandemic protocols.

Chris Hipkins, the country’s prime minister, said the requirement to wear masks in hospitals and other healthcare facilities would end at midnight, as would a requirement for people who caught the virus to isolate themselves for seven days.

New Zealand was praised for eliminating the virus entirely after imposing nationwide lockdowns and strict border controls at the beginning of the pandemic.

But as more infectious variants took hold, the nation’s zero-tolerance approach became untenable, forcing it to eventually abandon its elimination strategy.

Reflecting on the government’s response to the virus over more than three years, Mr Hipkins said that during the height of the pandemic he had longed for the day he could end all restrictions.

He said about 3,250 New Zealanders from a population of five million had died with Covid as a primary or secondary cause – about one-fifth of the mortality rate in the US.

‘New Zealanders can be enormously proud’

“While there were no doubt fractures in our collective sense of unity, I believe that New Zealanders can be enormously proud of what we achieved together,” Mr Hipkins said. 

“We stayed home, we made sacrifices, we got vaccinated, and there is absolutely no question, we saved lives.”

Ayesha Verrall, the health minister, said Covid case numbers and hospitalisations are low and had been trending down since June. She added that the publicly funded health system had faced less disruption from the virus this southern winter.

“We have been able to complete 16,000 more operations than we did last year, and so that is a very good indication our health system is on a much more even keel than it was,” she said.

The announcement comes two months before a general election.

David Seymour, the leader of the opposition ACT Party, said the government had been treating people like children for too long.

“They have been happy to impose high costs with little benefit and have taken their sweet time getting around to fixing it,” he said.