In NZ we went hard and early and the government initiated a full lock-down in April last year that lasted for almost two months. I co-manage an on-line photography group that met almost every Wednesday and most weekends. When this began I started a rolling virtual daily challenges for members to find specific things within their limited purview and provide images. The scenario provided was that they should imagine they are professionals and are tasked to produce images on demand for a client. I give a specific task, with a required number of images adhering to that and they shoot and post on the website for constructive comment - it starts at 12:00 am on a Saturday and ends 11:59 pm the following Friday. The tasks covered skill building, such as isolating subjects, slow shutter etc. and there were tasks like shooting on monochrome. I research articles and videos for reference as a guide.
I changed the task each day during lock-down and it proved highly popular, so much so that when the restrictions were relaxed we have continued that on a weekly basis. We're up to the 40's now and it's still going strong.
We are living essentially a normal life here, thanks to our isolation: we are 2000km from the next country (Australia), great government that put strong measures in place early and followed scientific and medical specialist advice. Also the government gained the hearts and minds of the population and they won an election in a landslide back in November, based on their pandemic response.
The following is a YouTube link to a WHO short video on NZ's pandemic response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLT-XdPRUAA&t=1s
Since the new year, we have had two lock-downs of Auckland specifically to combat limited community outbreaks from the newer, highly-contagious UK variant. These lasted about a week each. If Australia, our close partner and neighbour, continues to have a positive record, we hope to have a travel bubble in place with no two-week isolation required for travel between the two countries. That will not apply to people transiting through either from a third country unless it is one of the COVID-free Pacific Islands. Our economy has managed much better than feared, in fact our credit rating actually rose in the most recent Standard and Poors assessment. The biggest challenge is for our tourist industry that depended a lot on large numbers of overseas tourists. Still, many Kiwis have spent money holidaying at home instead of traveling overseas and that has provided some mitigation. The government is looking at this period of relative stagnation to re-assess and consider new measures to manage tourism and its impact on NZ.
