Saturday Morning With Jack Tame

It was a summer holiday on borrowed time.You’ve gotta admit, it’s pretty remarkable we made it this far without Omicron sweeping through. New Zealand enjoyed Christmas without widespread community transmission. Despite DJ Dimension, we made it through the New Year and most of January. But I think we can all see the end is nigh. It’s quite feasible that by this time next week, our Omicron daily case numbers will be in the thousands.Timing is everything in the Covid-19 response. In December, opposition MPs wanted the borders opened to people travelling from so-called low-risk countries, including Australia, so long as they’d had two vaccinations, tested negative before travelling, and were prepared to isolate at home. You can only imagine how much faster the new variant would have been circling here.All up, the hesitance to relax border restrictions probably bought us six weeks. Time for summer holidays, sure, but time also for a lot of Kiwis to receive their booster jabs.Unfortunately, I’m not one of them. Bec