In locked-down New Zealand, life orbits around the 1pm briefing. The director-general of health – frequently alongside the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern – takes the stage behind a socially distanced podium and updates the country.
In the middle of a Covid outbreak, as the country is , those briefings occur almost every weekday. They are so clockwork-regular, so predictable in their essential structure, that certain sentences have become memes: “Kia ora koutou katoa [Hello everyone]. There are X cases of Covid-19 in the community,” each begins. After the last outbreak, media outlet The Spinoff spliced together the director-general of health saying it 44 times.
“It became a cultural phenomenon,” science communication expert Rebecca Priestley said. “We were getting information directly from the prime minister and from the director-general of health and other representatives in a way that’s quite unusual.”
この記事は The Guardian Weekly の September 03, 2021 版に掲載されています。
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この記事は The Guardian Weekly の September 03, 2021 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
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