New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Kate Laurell Ardern who is serving as the 40th Prime Minister of New Zealand since 26 October 2017 has officially declared the nation had successfully defeated the deadly coronavirus outbreak among its residents.
Jacinda Ardern confirmed in a statement that there is no longer any undetected community transmission of the coronavirus epidemic as the nation prepares to move out of a weeks-long national lockdown at midnight Monday.
Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s Director General of Health, while addressing the reporters at the press conference said that the small number of new infections “does give us confidence that we’ve achieved our goal of elimination, which — that never meant zero but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from.”
However, this actually does not mean the infection has been stamped out as there was one positive case confirmed on Monday and four probable cases but according to Bloomfield, “does mean we know where our cases are coming from”.
“Our goal is elimination,” Bloomfield said. “And again, that doesn’t mean eradication but it means we get down to a small number of cases so that we are able to stamp out any cases and any outbreak that might come out.”
“So as we have said elimination means we may well reach zero but we may well then have small numbers of cases coming up again, that doesn’t mean we have failed,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern added at the conference. “It just means that we are in the position to have that zero-tolerance approach to have a very aggressive management of those cases and keep those numbers low and fading out again.”
Ardern was pretty much confident that New Zealand could continue on a path of success.