Summary
New Zealand’s royal commission into its Covid-19 response found vaccine mandates were reasonable based on available data but acknowledged they harmed social cohesion.
The report praised the country’s elimination strategy for achieving one of the lowest Covid death rates among developed nations while preventing healthcare system collapse.
However, it criticized prolonged lockdowns, weak health system preparedness, and a lack of planning for future crises.
Commissioners urged broad investment in pandemic readiness and emphasized the importance of both frontline and planning staff.
A second phase of the inquiry will review vaccine harms and conclude in 2026.
I’ll never forget watching NZ come out of lockdown and seeing people hug each other while I was still sanitizing groceries.
They were having rugby games while the rest of the world burned down in flames
Are you saying that New Zealand returned to normal before the rest of the world? Because that’s not how I remember it at all.
IIRC New Zealand returned to actual normal, as in COVID was a relative non-issue, faster than many other countries. Their restrictions were more severe and weren’t lifted very quickly, but when they were lifted things were actually fine.
Places like the US and much of Canada dropped restrictions while things were still pretty bad in terms of infection rates and strain on health care systems, and really they hardly enforced them to begin with. You could see this as a return to normalcy since restrictions were gone, but in Alberta they lifted restrictions when we were still dealing with plenty of deaths, severely impacted health care, and on top of that we were still figuring out the implications of the whole long COVID thing. That’s not a return to normal, I don’t think, it’s pretending things are normal when they’re not.
NZ had relatively a very short lock down and were one of the few oecd countries that was back to regular life in 2020. Other than wearing masks in certain places you could go to restaurants, movies, regular shops etc.
Eventually there was another lock down, for most of the country it was much shorter. One town had to go longer though cause they kept having cases pop up.
We had a four week (incredibly strict) lockdown in 2020 and then life returned to normal because we eliminated the virus. In late 2021 the delta variant ruined all that and the government attempted a half-assed lockdown which didn’t do much and that’s where a lot of the anger came from.
