Early Edition with Kate Hawkesby

I feel for the South Island, with their gradual waking up to the fact that Delta is real. A couple of weeks ago I said to my sister, who lives in Christchurch, when she called me en-route from her pilates class to her café lunch, before probably going on to the hairdresser, that she was living in a parallel universe. I told her I figured the South Island was where the whole of NZ was 11 weeks ago, when we thought Delta was just a “somewhere else” problem. We smugly watched from the comfort of our crowded cafes as chaos unfolded across the Tasman and we thought – oh lucky us, it’s not real for us here. And then boom, there it was. And how our lives have changed. I told her it would show up on her doorstep, it was a matter of when not if. She was confident it wouldn’t and that they’d all be so well vaccinated by the time it did, that it’d be no worries. And then wham. Yesterday’s news of two positive cases in the city. I called her and suggested she go get her hair done and have her last café coffee. But she wa