>The world is crazy, sayeth the fellow ensconced at the end of the world in a nation that has no C19 and is last in the whole OECD for vaccination, but is generally OK with that. Until the next Australian infects a few dozen, of course, but so far even the Delta strain refuses to live up to its reputation despite over 3000 community contacts for the most recent infected tourist.

Perhaps you should sell bottled NZ air ;-)
Over here Delta itself has always had an R > 1, even while total R (coming from mostly alpha population) was < 0.9, most of the time < 0.8, and incidences were getting lower almost every day.

A great chance to see if any politician has learned from steady alpha growth beneath falling incidence start of this year here and the UK experiences with both alpha and delta - at least the guy set up by her own party to follow Merkel failed completely.
Total infection numbers still to low to get a stable picture of heightened or dampened dangers (hospitalization or case fatality) when compared to similar populations (stratified along age, perhaps sex dimesions and vaxx status at least, previously infected status hard to measure), but ease of transmission during best weather conditions promises interesting times on the incidence front at least in October.

Pure nosiness here: why is vacc% so low in NZ ? Your premier and other policies seem to be well above smarts found in politicians and their measures elsewhere and I don't think NZ has financial troubles ?

regards
thomas