Hands off

Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy essential workers, and now half the globe is proposing we swap her for their benighted leaders. As if! We're hanging on to her, thank you very much.

Cautious optimism

When New Zealand went into a four-week Level 4 lockdown on March 25, we had just over 100 cases. Modelling shows that had we not done the lockdown, we would have had 10,000 cases by now. Instead, we have 1,239 cases and one death. This is the fourth day the number of new cases have been dropping, and today the number of new cases is only 29.

What's more, today Jacinda announced compulsory supervised 14 day quarantines, with no end date, for everyone arriving in NZ, which solves the issue of what happens after lockdown. It's bad news for the tourist industry, and it still means we won't be able to leave the country until the rest of the world catches up, but I will most decidedly take that.

Hopefully it's not hubristic to say this, but I'm cautiously starting to hope that we've got this.