Thanks Fons - no thankfully I have been C-19 free all along, but sadly my brother contracted terminal cancer in 2019 and I went back to NZ in the last quarter of 2019 and then again in February 2020 to nurse him. He passed in May 2020, but I got stuck in NZ as part of the NZ nation wide C-19 lock down and have been here ever since. I hope to get back to Australia in March.
NZ have been lucky in respect of C-19, but were greatly helped by a comprehensive pandemic plan drawn up in 2002 to combat SARS and successive prime ministers from both sides of the political divide have thankfully kept it up to date to combat MERS in 2008/9 and then a bad avian flu outbreak in 2016 so the NZ prime minister and her government had something very solid to work from when C-19 came along. We were also helped by the fact that our Director General of Health is a medical man whose specialties are the management of epidemics and pandemics and who has had significant WHO experience. It is also fair to say that the NZ population has worked as a team.
