Sunday 14 February 2021

Summer in Auckland felt like a fool's paradise – we all knew it couldn't last | Steve Braunias

Reports of queues for inessential items have come in fast but we can still count ourselves lucky

The bananas were the first to go. “Look,” I said to my daughter. We stood and gazed at the supermarket shelves set aside for bananas. They’d been stripped bare less than an hour after the latest lockdown was announced. We sighed, and then went about stripping the shelves of nectarines. She asked, “Will six do?” I said, “No. Grab 10. You never know.”

Last night’s lockdown announcement took place at 7pm. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern called an urgent press conference and emergency sirens wailed from mobile phones – they’d make a good ringtone – as New Zealanders were told to return to various states of lockdown. A family of three in South Auckland had tested positive for Covid-19. The city was put in lockdown level 3 at midnight, the rest of the country in the more relaxed level 2. It’s in place till Wednesday midnight and what happens after that is largely going to depend on whether more cases are tested positive in the community.

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from World news | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NvGXzS

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