The Director General of Health says there will always be uncertainty about when Covid-19 would peak but the Government’s plan is to “stamp out” and eradicate the virus.
As New Zealand enters it’s second week of a month-long lockdown, Dr Ashley Bloomfield says data will be crucial in determining when the national lockdown will end.
“It may be Saturday we can update you,” he told media today, but was quick to add he could not make any promises.
Dr Bloomfield says the current measures are designed to eliminate Covid-19. These include border controls, strict physical isolation measures, contact tracing and testing.
“Our goal is to get the number of cases right down again and as soon as we can we will want to step down from Alert Level 4 to Alert Level 3,” he says.
He said it may well be that the country will operate at differing alert levels following this current lockdown depending on how infection numbers range.
These significant measures we've taken he said was a way to “head off” virus numbers in a way that other countries had not been successful in doing.
“One of our key drivers of this, has been to protect our healthcare system, to protect our population – keep them well and to not see the number of deaths that some of the modelling suggested would happened and we didn’t see that as tenable or where we wanted to go.
“If we need to, we will keep the measures in place until we see that drop off in cases.”
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