WHO: New Zealand's virus response made it more controllable

The Executive Director of the WHO's Health Emergencies Programme said Friday New Zealand's "comprehensive" and "systematic" response to the coronavirus outbreak made it more controllable.

Speaking in Geneva, Michael Ryan added it was "hard to make hard and fast rules" for how individual countries were affected by the virus.

While most countries are working on ways to contain the coronavirus, New Zealand has set itself a much more ambitious goal: eliminating it altogether.

And experts believe the country could pull it off.

The virus “doesn’t have superpowers,” said Helen Petousis-Harris, a vaccine expert at the University of Auckland. “Once transmission is stopped, it’s gone.”

Geography has helped. If any place could be described as socially distant it would be New Zealand, surrounded by stormy seas, with Antarctica to the south. With 5 million people spread across an area the size of Britain, even the cities aren’t overly crowded.

And Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had taken bold steps, putting the country under a strict lockdown in late March, when only about 100 people had tested positive for the new virus. Her motto: “Go hard and go early.”