A record number of new Covid-19 cases were recorded in Otago and Southland yesterday, as the Government prepares to ease pandemic restrictions.
This morning, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is scheduled to announce plans for managing Covid-19 beyond the Omicron outbreak.
It is anticipated the plan will signal the end of gathering limits, vaccine passes and several vaccine mandates.
Ms Ardern said on Monday no changes would take effect immediately.
Southern businesses, especially those hard hit by the pandemic restrictions, were keen to hear Ms Ardern announce any change to the traffic light settings which would increase gathering limits, at present restricted to 100 under the Red setting.
Royal Albatross Centre manager Hoani Langsbury said, like all tourism businesses, the centre wanted overseas visitors back as soon as possible, but it also needed gathering numbers eased to cater for them.
"Vaccine passes are no longer as important as they were ... A pass doesn’t tell us if a visitor is carrying the virus or not," he said.
"A real help for us would not having to social distance, because the size of our observatories seriously limits the number of people we can put on a tour and obey the rules."
Speight’s Ale House Dunedin owner Mark Scully said hospitality needed an end to gathering limits.
"Numbers are vital for us. Events drive our business and we have had no graduations, no concerts, no Masters Games, and that has made it really hard, so it would be really good to see that 100-person limit change."
Mr Scully said the hospitality sector needed people to be confident they could go out safely again.
"We are almost having a lockdown by stealth at the moment because people are staying away," he said.
Dunedin Venues Management Ltd chief executive Terry Davies has had to keep many of the spaces he manages in mothballs for much of the past two years.
"We want anything which would allow mass gatherings and any easing of protocols which would allow people to come back to events," he said.
"We just want people to be able to go out together again."
However, University of Otago epidemiologist Prof Michael Baker warned people should be careful what they wished for, and said measures such as vaccine passes should be strengthened to reflect Omicron and booster shots, rather than weakened.
"We can’t be dictated to by wishful thinking, because while we would love the pandemic to go away and for the Omicron wave to be the end of it, we know that is not going to be the case."
Several countries had experienced multiple waves of Omicron, and there was always the risk of new variants, Prof Baker said.
"In Australia, after the Omicron peak, cases have returned to quite a high baseline.
"It hasn’t gone away. That is what we should be planning for rather than loosening controls.
"That baseline level will still be thousands of cases a day and potentially 200-300 people in hospital, and that is a huge drain on our healthcare resources."
The South had another day of record Covid cases yesterday, 1439 recorded in Otago and Southland.
Dunedin had the highest number of cases, 407, but Invercargill and Southland combined totalled 470 cases.
There were 23 people in the region in hospital who had Covid, 20 in Dunedin, 2 in Southland and 1 in Lakes Hospital.
The SDHB said no further positive cases were recorded yesterday in connection with Covid scares in two Dunedin hospital wards.
Nationally, there were 20,907 new community cases, 15 deaths and 1016 people in hospital yesterday.
