New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced on Tuesday that a seven-day mandatory coronavirus quarantine period will be kept in place through the end of 2023 and possibly beyond.
Hipkins said his Cabinet performed a “difficult balancing act” and had to “weigh a number of things quite carefully” before deciding to keep the quarantine policy for people who test positive for Wuhan coronavirus infection.
“The isolation period serves not just to relieve pressure on the health system and result in fewer people being infected, but actually there is a labor market incentive for this as well,” he said.
Hipkins said a somewhat more relaxed system that could allow people to return to work more quickly after testing negative would be evaluated over the summer, and the quarantine policy might be abandoned in 2024, although he would not firmly commit to a timetable.
“We are heading towards a point where [Wuhan coronavirus] will become normal. I would expect certainly at the latest by the end of the winter we’ll be into that zone,” he said.
“We know isolation for [Wuhan coronavirus] cases is the best way to break the chain of transmission to make sure people aren’t passing on the virus and getting other people sick,” Health Minister Ayesha Verrall said after the Cabinet meeting.
“Isolation remains effective in managing spread and keeping case numbers down, and it also helps reduce pressure on our hospital services,” Verrall said.
New Zealand health officials largely favored keeping the quarantine policy in place, even though most of the rest of the world has moved on from the coronavirus pandemic, because they felt maintaining the quarantine requirement would inspire citizens to take possible coronavirus infections more seriously and because they feared the winter cold season could bring a surge of cases.
Hipkins said last year’s fall wave of illness among teachers, which caused “some schools not able then to offer the full…