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.”
Denne historien er fra September 03, 2021-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra September 03, 2021-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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