New Zealand marked 100 days on Sunday with no recorded cases of the coronavirus in the community but health officials warned there was no room for complacency.
"Achieving 100 days without community transmission is a significant milestone, however, as we all know, we can't afford to be complacent," director-general of health Ashley Bloomfield said.
New Zealand relied on three types of measures to get rid of the virus:
1. Ongoing border controls to stop Covid-19 from entering the country
2. A lockdown and physical distancing to stop community transmission
3. Case-based controls using testing, contact tracing and quarantine.
New Zealand is one of a small number of jurisdictions – including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, Australia and Fiji – pursuing Covid-19 containment or elimination. Most have had new outbreaks. The exceptions are Taiwan, Fiji and New Zealand.
The key difference is that New Zealand committed relatively early to a clearly articulated elimination strategy and pursued it aggressively. An intense lockdown proved highly effective at rapidly extinguishing the virus.
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