“The government needs to start using the covid hospitalisation rate and ICU numbers to make decisions and shift from using the increasingly irrelevant ‘community case numbers’,” says Winston Peters Leader of New Zealand First.

“It is important that we make the right decisions based on the right information for the health of kiwis, their freedoms, their businesses, and their livelihoods.”

“University of Auckland emeritus professor of medicine Des Gorman has stated that the continued use by the government of statistics such as the number of cases in the community is becoming ‘superfluous.’”

“It was right in the beginning to focus on community cases to stop the spread, but we are in a position now to focus on ensuring our health system can handle any serious cases that may occur.  It is no longer about whether people have the virus.”

“The entire intent of vaccination is to ensure people and the community can live normal lives with covid in our midst. We will soon be over eighty percent fully vaccinated and moving towards ninety.”

“We currently have forty two covid cases in hospital across the country – with well over one and a half million people in lockdown.” 

“Continuing to base lockdown decisions on increasingly irrelevant data is causing multiple unnecessary business and social disasters,” says Mr Peters.