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In Wellington (I live there) there's a QR code on every shop you're supposed to scan with your phone for contact tracing. Most people don't but they still see them - so yes it's still on our minds.

Good point.

There are supposed to be QR codes here. I only visit one place, to buy food every 7-9 days, they don't have a QR code and employees seemed confused about what one was or why I might be surprised not to see one. I gave up rather than expend any more time trying to have a conversation through masks with confused people about something they can't fix.

They did, I noticed when I last visited yesterday, begin explicitly telling people that "One adult shopper" does not mean, "What a fun outing, let's all go to the store as a family and increases everyone's exposure for no reason".

> Most people don't but they still see them - so yes it's still on our minds.

It was striking to me how few masks and how little QR scanning was going on in Wellington when I went there from Auckland.

Auckland has slipped a lot, but it seemed way slacker in Wellington.

That's insane. Here in Korea you're required to scan the code (or write your contact info on paper) in order to enter the premises.

Historically New Zealand's government has found that compliance isn't massively improved by empty threats, and police resources aren't available to have an officer at the front door of every shop in the country and enforce such a law, so there isn't one.

What does improve compliance is an actual negative event. The change in public reaction to funeral restrictions in lock down when people attending a funeral got sick (and I think one died?) was noticeable. Reported consequences make the policy much harder to ignore. And if there hasn't been enforcement the way human memory works, if on Tuesday a human decides complying with a rule is good, they are now more likely to remember having complied with it on Monday, and retrospectively they will come to believe "obviously" they always obeyed that policy, it was the sensible thing to do.

That's cheaper and more effective than policing. But it may cost a few lives to provide the example.

Compliance could be easily checked by the mystery shopper method though. If a store gets fined for not enforcing QR codes through a random check, they're more likely to enforce it and deny non-scanning shoppers entry.

You don't need armed enforcement to get people to scan a QR code, you just need an employee to ask politely.

You could check how many codes were scanned and compare to how many puchases were made and fine business where this differes a lot from the best ones.

This would encourage employees to ask shoppers.

> This might reduce take up. [...] if you live in Wellington you likely have stopped even thinking about the pandemic most days

It would certainly reduce the urgency of take-up, but I would expect there to be a pretty strong correlation between how well a city/country deals with the pandemic, and the proportion of residents in that region who think that getting the vaccine is important, even if it's a vaccine for a virus that's not directly affecting them right at this moment.

I live in a region that eradicated the virus a long time ago, but I still think about it almost every day because the world's so interconnected. It has had almost zero effect on my personal life since March, but the vast majority of my friends overseas are in unending lockdown cycles, and international news is almost exclusively about the latest death tolls or what the vaccine progress is like. It would be pretty difficult to not know what's going on.

> An interesting contrast will be New Zealand. Since they have community elimination they didn't seek emergency use authorisation, why not wait and study what happens to the millions of people from other developed countries who needed urgent vaccination?

Keeping it out is proving to be quite hard, an exception for quarantine workers, flight crew, returning citizens and anyone connected to them would make it much easier.

It seems like the world is already learning though and countries that have eliminated the virus may find vaccinating the extremely frail to be a net negative and rely on herd immunity to protect this group.