Epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker says New Zealand could adopt a regional approach to fighting the spread of Covid-19, with the Government only having to look across the Tasman for a perfect example.
Speaking to 1News on Friday night, Baker said while he understood the Government ditching the elimination approach in Auckland, he found it surprising how poor the messaging around the new strategy was.
"I found it incredibly confusing," Baker told 1News host Melissa Stokes.
"It's quite surprising because usually the Government is incredibly clear about our strategy and has a really coherent approach to the interventions we're going to use."
Introducing steps on top of the already-existing alert level system had left a lot of people "quite confused".
"I think we can do better than this in terms of communicating to New Zealand," Baker said, before suggesting an option for the Government could be to take a regional approach.
"That would be keeping with suppression in Auckland, which is what we're doing, and the rest of the country could continue with an elimination strategy.
He pointed to Australia, where five out of eight states had kept an elimination strategy, with Tasmania not having recorded a case for nearly 18 months.
"I think if we did this it would mean we could protect much of New Zealand from getting infected and getting seriously ill, while we raise our vaccination levels about 90 per cent.
"We certainly need real clarity about the strategy we're using going ahead."
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