New Zealanders have been asked to endure a touch more pain in the interests of long-term gain.
The country would move to Covid-19 Alert Level 3 on Monday at 11.59pm, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced yesterday.
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While she said the extension of Level 4 restrictions by five days was necessary to fully combat the spread of the lethal disease, the move was criticised by the National Party for risking further damage to the economy.
After a Cabinet meeting which lasted most of the day, Ms Ardern announced that she and her ministers had reached consensus to follow the advice of Director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield and move to Covid-19 Alert Level 3.
However, the shift will be gradual — the country remains in Level 4 for another week before the shift to Level 3.
Under Level 3, people will still be expected to stay at home as much as they can, but some businesses will be able to reopen in a limited capacity, and some schools will reopen on April 29.
Ms Ardern said New Zealand would spend at least a fortnight at Level 3 and Cabinet would consider a further change of alert level on May 11.
She said the Government wanted to move cautiously to ensure the virus was truly in check before allowing greater freedom of movement and more people to return to work.
"Waiting to move alert levels next week costs us two more business days, but gives us much greater longer-term health and economic returns down the track," she said.
"It means we are less likely to go backwards."
The Cabinet decision came after nine new Covid-19 cases were confirmed nationally yesterday, the third day in the past four that single digits of new cases had been detected.
For the second day running, no new cases were reported in the South, the region with the highest number of Covid-19 infections in the country.
The number of Covid-19 cases have declined markedly in the past 10 days; on April 10, 44 new cases were confirmed nationally, and the daily numbers have mostly fallen since then.
Dwindling numbers of new cases, and an assurance a robust system of contact tracing would be instituted, persuaded Ms Ardern New Zealand was able to relax its disease management restrictions and move to Level 3.
Shortly after she confirmed the scheduled move to Level 3, Health Minister David Clark announced a $55million boost for contact tracing.
The funding announcement coincided with the Government’s release yesterday of an audit of its contact tracing system, conducted by University of Otago infectious diseases physician Dr Ayesha Verrall.
Dr Verrall said that expansion of the public health unit workforce was urgently needed, that performance measures should be put in place, and that the national close contact service system "has limited use in certain important situations such as in the event of a large complex cluster or specific scenarios that require intense involvement of medical officers of health".
National health spokesman Michael Woodhouse said he was disappointed the health system was not of a standard to move to Level 3 immediately, and called Dr Verrall’s report "damning".
"It was obvious this [contact tracing] was absolutely fundamental to keeping the spread of Covid-19 down, enabling us to go out of Level 4 lockdown, and I’m disappointed that it has taken a report from a public health expert for him [Dr Clark] to react in the way that he should have."
National leader Simon Bridges said an extra week of Level 4 restrictions could have a worse impact than the harm it was meant to avoid.
The Government had failed to do the groundwork for New Zealand to move to Level 3 faster, Mr Bridges said.
"Tens of thousands of businesses and workers will be out of work, because that time really matters."
