New Zealand officials have told hospital workers they can help out on understaffed Covid-19 wards even if they were mildly sick themselves as the country reported a record of nearly 24,000 new daily cases in the last 24 hours.

It is the latest sign of just how radically New Zealand’s approach to the virus has shifted, moving from elimination to suppression and now to something approaching acceptance as the Omicron variant has taken hold.

Experts say New Zealand’s sometimes counterintuitive actions have likely saved thousands of lives by allowing the nation to mostly avoid earlier, more deadly variants and buying time to get people vaccinated. The nation of five million has reported just 65 virus deaths since the pandemic began.

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