Traffic Light Life
We’ve now spent about two weeks under the new traffic light system, and I’ve been able to process what I see in Auckland which is in the red zone. First, it is not all doom and gloom. The average daily rate has been trending down, and though there are more cases popping up around the country, the number of cases in Auckland hasn’t exploded. The district health board (DHB) with the most cases is Counties Manukau, which is southwest of the heart of Auckland. Our current positivity rate is around .3%.
Of the 13 DHBs, five are over the 90% threshold for vaccination rates - Auckland, Canturbury, Capital and Coast, Southern, and Waitemata. Overall, 89% of the eligible population is vaccinated. (However, the vaccines are not approved for kids under 12 yet. There is still a big chunk of the population that is unvaccinated.) The high vaccination rates are no doubt contributing to the low infection rates.
Everything gets a little more complicated with the arrival of omicron to New Zealand - in the form of exposed air crew from Australia. We’ll see what becomes of this, but everyone acknowledges that it is only a matter of time until omicron sweeps through New Zealand, too.
Today the Auckland border opens up and people will be able to move about the country more freely. It will be interesting to see how covid spreads in this environment, or if the high vaccination rates and spot checks at the border for vaccine passes and negative test results will keep covid from spreading too much. Kiwis love to travel in the summer months, and I expect that the city is going to empty out since Aucklanders have been unable to leave for the past few months. Auckland will probably be the safest it is going to be on December 16.
The downside to the summer months is that people are getting rather slack with masks. I know they can feel hot and stuffy, but there have been more noses sticking out of the top of masks in the past two weeks than I’ve seen for the whole of the pandemic. In general, people are wearing them as little as possible, meaning they may hastily throw one on before entering a store, but it might be off before they’ve left the building. Staff in stores are hesitant to make a fuss with anyone not wearing a mask, so I think I’m going to see more and more maskless or partially masked people going forward as people get more bold.
Retail and hospitality are open, but technically with limits until we move to orange on December 31. What these limits are is hard to tell. No one seems to care or enforce capacity limits or check for vaccine passes (with the exception of the library). I think the vaccine passes are a good idea, but the confusion around who needs to check them, how, and when, has meant in reality that people are throwing their hands up and just not dealing with them. I guess we’re all counting on the fact that in Auckland, at least, 97% of us are at least partially vaccinated and 94% of us are fully vaccinated.
I’ve taken a very cautious approach - compared to Kiwis - to participating in more social activities over the past couple of weeks. I’m not anxious to go and be part of the experiment group to see how much resilience the traffic light system has. I’m much more inclined to go slowly and evaluate things as they progress, and I’m thankful to have our “two of four” framework to fall back on when deciding what to participate in.
This was especially evident while talking with a few friends earlier in the week when I commented about what a cultural divide there was between the American expat community’s approach to leaving lockdown and native New Zealanders. The Kiwis in the group stopped to think about it. Not one of them knew anyone personally who had contracted covid, let alone died from it. I don’t know one American who can say the same. The difference in the personal experiences shows: the Kiwis are annoyed that life isn’t completely back to normal while the Americans are more than happy to stay away from any group gathering, especially if there aren’t masks or the outdoors involved. While my Kiwi friends have certainly been kind about my cautious approach, I think this was the first time they had really thought about how our experiences differ throughout the pandemic. I know it gave at least one of them a very different perspective on my behaviour as of late.
