New Zealand sets 90 percent vaccine target to end lockdowns and reopen

New Zealand will end its strict coronavirus lockdown measures and restore more freedoms only when 90% of its eligible population is fully vaccinated, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Friday

Once the poster child for stamping out COVID-19, New Zealand has been unable to beat an outbreak of the highly infectious Delta variant of COVID-19 centered in Auckland, forcing Ardern to abandon her elimination strategy and switch to living with the virus.

When the vaccine target is reached, the country will move into a new traffic-light system to manage outbreaks in regions. Vaccine certificate will be central to the new system, which will also use three settings - green, orange and red - to manage fresh outbreaks and cases, Ardern said the new system would also mean an end to nationwide lockdowns.

New Zealand reported a record 129 COVID-19 cases on Friday, a daily record for the third time this week, despite Auckland remaining in lockdown for over two months. Looser restrictions are in place in most of the rest of the country of 5 million.

Jacinda Adern said: “We can rightfully be proud of what our world leading response has achieved. But two things have changed since them. The first is that delta has made it very hard to maintain our elimination strategy. Its tentacles have reached into our communities and made it hard to shake, even using the best public health measures and the toughest restrictions we had available to us.”