Chai's Blog

New Zealand eased into a less severe Lev­el 3 of lock­down today (from 00:00 on April 28th), after about five-and-half weeks of strict lock­down in Lev­el 4 that start­ed from 11:59 pm on March 25th.

We are going to stay in Lev­el 3 for two weeks until May 11th. On May 11th, the cab­i­net will announce the nation’s next step in the fight against Covid-19. In a great piece of news, the new Covid-19 cas­es over the past eight days remained in sin­gle dig­its. I am also delight­ed to see the over­all num­ber of infect­ed New Zealan­ders in the sub-1500 range so far since this out­break. Over 80% of those peo­ple have recov­ered.

Lev­el 3 feels dif­fer­ent from Lev­el 4 in a few ways: there are more peo­ple and cars on roads, there is some busi­ness activ­i­ty like take­away cof­fees and fast food. Some schools and child­care cen­tres are open.

It is great to see some peo­ple and activ­i­ty com­pared to how ghost­ed the streets were for the past five weeks. But I am not too excit­ed as yet. I am not yet com­fort­able send­ing the son to the school; nei­ther the school is wel­com­ing all chil­dren yet.

I am look­ing for­ward to see­ing how the curve fares in the next two weeks. I will cel­e­brate more once we go fur­ther down to Lev­el 2.

For now, though, I am treat­ing this as Lev­el 4 with one perk: I could now get my dai­ly cof­fee fix from my reg­u­lar cof­fee take­away out­let. I got one today and boy it tast­ed great! I have no inten­tion to con­tribute to traf­fic grid­locks at McDon­alds around the city. I missed my usu­al eatouts and cafes but no so much to flock on the first day of less severe lock­down. I missed my cof­fee most and am glad to have it again.

Over­all I am impressed with the progress this coun­try has made with keep­ing the Covid-19 under con­trol. In the com­ing weeks, I look for­ward to more eas­ing, schools ful­ly open­ing, and my oth­er favourite cof­fee shop open­ing, all while main­tain­ing phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing and oth­er health and safe­ty pro­ce­dures, of course! It looks like we are mak­ing sub­stan­tial progress in this coun­try.