WELLINGTON, New Zealand — For much of the past two years, Covid-19 was a phantom presence in New Zealand, a plague experienced mostly through news reports from faraway lands.
Now, suddenly, it has become a highly personal threat.
New Zealand is being walloped by a major outbreak of the Omicron variant, with the virus spreading at what may be the fastest rate in the world. On Thursday, the country reported 23,194 new cases, a once unthinkable number in a small island nation of about five million people where the record daily case count before the current wave was in the low hundreds.
The explosion in cases has come as the government, under political pressure, loosened its strict regulations meant to prevent the spread of the virus, and as the highly transmissible Omicron reduced the effectiveness of the controls that remained.
That has filled many New Zealanders with anxiety as they learn to live with the pandemic-related risk that the rest of the world has grappled with since early 2020.
“For the vast majority of the pandemic, most New Zealanders didn’t know anyone who had Covid-19. That’s changing massively now,” said Siouxsie Wiles, a microbiologist at the University of Auckland. “This is the first time most New Zealanders are dealing with Covid-19 in their own homes.”
source : New York Times
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