I do worry about one thing and it was an important point Pogue mentioned a bit back and thats while we will get up to 80% vaccinated we wont also have the added protection of a certain portion of the population immune due to having had the virus. 80% vaccinated here still means 1 million people not vaccinated and thats a decent number of people not protected. The largest group of at risk are our Pacifica population and they mostly live in our biggest city of 1.6 million people. They have large extended families and often have more than 6 people per household. I think we might see some significant hospitalisation once we are mostly vaccinated and start to open up.
Population wide, 80% take-up would be a massive success and with luck any covid outbreak would be self-limiting and sporadic. Whereas 80% of over 16s would just give you a natural retardant to a sudden rise in cases, but you'll see a lot of cases.
It's at that moment where your mindset has to change - do cases matter or are they just an early warning for hospitalisations and deaths.
Wide availability of testing can help - the NZ population are already used to the social solidarity argument, so stay home if you've got symptoms and get a test should be an easy sell. Provided it's backed with sickpay and other provisions (like home working or care leave) of course.
In terms of hospitalisations and deaths - the crunch is how close to 100% vaccination of the most vulnerable you can get. In this context 90% adult take-up is twice as good as 80%. But 98%+ uptake in the over 70s is even more essential.
Sounds obvious given what we know about age and covid risk? Not every country can do it, and not every country seems to be chasing it. Here's Hong Kong: