Wellington, Oct 26 (Agency) Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern announced that all employees in workplaces that require visitors to provide Covid-19 vaccination certificates for entry will also need to be vaccinated, 1News reported on Tuesday. “If customers must be vaccinated, then so too must the workers. We want customers safe, and workers safe too,” Ardern said as quoted by the news channel. The new rules will reportedly be imposed in New Zealand after 90 percent of the country’s population are fully vaccinated.
The requirement for a vaccination certificate will be optional for many workplaces, but it will become mandatory for large-scale events, the channel said.
Health and education workers in New Zealand are required to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by January 2022. Mandatory vaccination is also applicable to employees of correctional institutions, border and port workers. The number of registered Covid-19 cases in New Zealand for the entire period of the pandemic is estimated to be 5,822, with 28 deaths. The daily number of coronavirus cases is currently increasing, with 109 new locally acquired cases registered on Monday, which is the second-worst day of new infections since the start of the pandemic. New Zealand has administered at least 6,634,258 doses of Covid-19 vaccines, which means about 67 percent of the country’s population has been vaccinated.