I’m one of the city’s many undercover agents, ready to pounce on any and all lockdown infringements

Nine weeks into Tāmaki Makaurau’s lockdown, having pushed the limits on baking, introspection and backgammon, I’ve taken to running.

No, not for any of the health benefits – running at my size can’t be healthy; it’s a chance to go snooping. I’ve always enjoyed sticking my nose in other people’s business, but society has repressed these urges. Lockdown, finally, has given me the licence to pry.

The government is using an array of sweeteners, gimmicks and incentives to raise inoculation rates, including turning a 787 Dreamliner into a vaccination clinic

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You can do it in the cabin of a Dreamliner plane. You can do it at a race track. You can even do it in a fast food drive-through queue.

New Zealand’s government is employing a host of increasingly weird and wonderful strategies, gimmicks and sweeteners in a bid to get the last 20% of its eligible population inoculated against Covid-19.

Plans for how health system would deal with surge revealed as country records 71 new cases

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New Zealand is preparing to face up to 5,300 cases of Covid-19 a week in Auckland and the neighbouring region of Northland alone next year, even with a vaccination rate of 90%, according to modelling from the Ministry of Health.

The minister of health, Andrew Little revealed the plan for how the health system could manage a surge in cases after the current vaccination drive, as the country recorded 71 new cases on Thursday.

Allowing the virus to become endemic would mean the regular closure of schools and businesses and thousands of deaths each year

As New Zealand switches from elimination to suppression, those who argue that Covid-19 will become endemic and part of our lives either do not understand or ignore what this would actually mean.

Elimination has always been a tricky word because it implies eradication. But we have only ever eradicated one human disease – smallpox – and are close with several others.

Without a dramatic change in New Zealand’s vaccination rates, Covid-19 risks becoming a disease for brown people

And so with that, a confusing 20-minute monologue in the Beehive theatrette, New Zealand’s virus-beating elimination strategy is over. As the Delta variant’s “tentacles”, to borrow the prime minister’s description, creep past the Auckland border, potentially wrapping themselves around parts of the Waikato, the government will no longer aim to cut the monster off at its head with tough alert level four restrictions. Instead public health officials will move to a suppression strategy aiming “to contain and control the virus” while we vaccinate our way out of the pandemic. At its simplest, Jacinda Ardern’s message from the threatrette was vaccinate, vaccinate, vaccinate.

For 18 months New Zealanders were living life as if there were no pandemic. We were gathering outdoors and indoors in the thousands, mask mandates were literally a foreign concept, and business and public services were operating more or less as normal. We were watching governments that let the virus rip with a good dose of horror and, if we’re honest, a modest dose of smugness. And so yesterday’s announcement – that the virus will remain resident in this country – feels like a form of whiplash. Only two weeks ago the prime minister stood in that familiar theatrette and told the country returning to zero cases was still the goal.

Concerns about the toll a suppression approach may take have dampened excitement about loosened restrictions

New Zealanders are grieving for the end of the country’s Covid elimination strategy and anxious about what the future holds, a day after prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country would switch to a suppression approach.

“It’s kind of a grieving for what we are losing,” microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of the pandemic response’s most prominent science communicators, said. “We are very clearly losing alert level one, and the freedoms and privileges that come with [it].”