The world is currently recovering from a pandemic, one that shut down every country on Earth. Most countries are still very much in the pandemic with no clear end in sight, meanwhile, New Zealand has come up with possibly the biggest flex of 2020 by holding a Rugby match with 31,000 people without masks!

With a population of around 50lakhs, New Zealand has come out of this pandemic unscathed. This picture shows 31,000 people attending a Rugby game between the all blacks and Wallabies without any mask and social distancing. They could do this because there is no COVID 19 case as of now in the whole country. No one is infected with the virus which means people do not have to social distance themselves from each other or use any mask.

Small population and effective lockdown measures

The country has a population of 48 lakhs, for comparison, Bangalore has a population of 1.2 Crores. A small population certainly helped New Zealand contain the virus and eradicate it but an effective lockdown also helped a great deal. The country was among the first ones to go into lockdown with international flights stopped as early as February. Jacinda Ardern, the New Zealand prime minister said, “While there was no playbook for Covid-19, we went hard and early and committed to a strategy of elimination which has meant that when we’ve had new cases, we’ve circled and stamped them out and opened up our economy faster than others,” when talking about the success in tackling Coronavirus.

The smaller countries like Japan, South Korea and New Zealand have done a very good job of eliminating COVID cases in their countries that the other countries continue to fight out with no end in sight. For comparison, India is still seeing around 75,000 new cases everyday.