New Zealand is likely to hit the Omicron peak mid-to-late March, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Monday.
Ardern also said once cases begin to fall, "that is the point where we can start doing things differently", in terms of restrictions and mandates.
It came as mandate protesters reached the second week of occupation around Parliament.
"Everyone is over Covid," Ardern said in a message to the protesters during a post-Cabinet address. "No one wants to live with rules or restrictions, but had we not all been willing to work together to protect one another, then we would all have been worse off as individuals, including losing people we love."
Jacinda Ardern says its predicted cases will continue to double every three to four days. (Source: 1News)
Ardern said the primary goal was to manage Covid "with as few restrictions on our daily lives as possible", to ensure people were safe and to accelerate the economy.
"What that means in terms of changing restrictions isn’t an easy question to answer in an often unpredictable pandemic," she said.
Ardern said looking to other countries' experiences with Covid could help predict its future in New Zealand.
"We know our wave of cases is likely to hit a peak in roughly mid-to-late March. Only three to six weeks away."
After the peak, New Zealand would likely see a "rapid decline, followed by cases stabilising at a lower level", she said.
"That is the point where we can start doing things differently."
She said once New Zealand had come out of the peak and hospitals were not overwhelmed, "we can begin to ease the public health measures that did their job at slowing the wave down".
Ardern said New Zealand could go through the traffic lights system with restrictions such as gathering limits easing.
She said vaccine passes "while they have been necessary… they've also been temporary".
"Vaccine passes were a way of ensuring... that people who were in high risk places, had some layer of protection. But, once we come through a wave and peak of Omicron, that equation changes because many unvaccinated people will at that point have been exposed to the virus.
"The reason we will be able to move away from vaccine passes and many mandates is because more people will have had Covid," Ardern said
She said mandates would remain important in areas where people were working vulnerable people, such as healthcare.
"My expectation is that we'll see a real narrowing of where we use mandates, once we come through a peak, because in those cases we'll see many more unvaccinated people who will have experienced Covid-19 by then."
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