Anger and grief: New Zealanders fearful as Covid elimination strategy ends

Concerns about the toll a suppression approach may take have dampened excitement about loosened restrictions

New Zealanders are grieving for the end of the country's Covid elimination strategy and anxious about what the future holds, a day after prime minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country would switch to a suppression approach.

It's kind of a grieving for what we are losing," microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of the pandemic response's most prominent science communicators, said. We are very clearly losing alert level one, and the freedoms and privileges that come with [it]," she said.