Tramping illegal

Oath !. I'ld go with the official guidelines that say you can go 45 minutes to your local beach (day hike) not your favourite one. If Canty foothills fit the distance, Geeves, then you might get a talking to from a cop for not upholding the 'spirit' of our predicament. But it doesn't look like it'll be illegal after next Monday. Unless you're into transcendental ultra-running & want to do thousands of laps ?. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Transcendence_3100_Mile_Race I would say places like Godley Head in Chch, for example, will be busy with trail runners & walkers. There'll be other less congested places if you want to do hill walks, but it's still not the time over-extend. Patience, I'm afarid ?. Sorry about your Auckland population problem, Wayno.

Methinks it's the conflicting information and perhaps the powers that be being too prescriptive about what you can and can't do. I'm hearing that I should stay within 10 minutes of home and only go out for essentials but then on the official website it says that a 45 minute drive to get to the beach is okay. Getting bogged down trying to justify what is and isn't okay probably isn't that helpful. Whatever we do, when out and about, avoid people like the plague, pun definitely intended. Hopefully we're all back out in the hills before we know it.

How can we expect a single set of rules for the whole of nz? There are plenty of communities round here who need to travel over an hour just to get to a supermarket or shops. But have endless space for a walk or hunt on their doorsteps. Then the likes of wayno who are minutes from a shop & hours from the open space, isolation & peace that some of us need for our health & wellbeing. Hard to legislate common sense & considerstion. But that's what's required here. Tread lightly & do no harm.

Yah. If you're a Te Anau person that trail runs the Kepler in a day for training couldn't you legally resume that ? If that's the level you function at. Then again, the guy who fell off a cliff on Liesure Island (Tauranga), while the Island was out of bounds, involved 20 emergency service workers, one of whom got knocked by the helicopter's rescue basket & also went over the cliff !. It's not an equal World, and you win some & you lose some. Circumstances will change. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12325130

Being an unequal world is why I figured it would probably have been easier just to say level three was the same as level four in terms of what outdoor physical activity you could do. In theory it is only going to be for an extra two weeks. Just starts to get really complicated oterwise.

True dat. But my nearest neighbour employs staff and they have been working throughout. I go back to work next Tuesday. Another neighbour does not. I'm happy to see any little steps toward 'normality' as it was, even if it's piecemeal.

Incidentally, an American benchmark indicator for oil turned negative overnight. Some producers are now paying for the stuff to be taken away. That's a step beyond giving it away for free!. Can't link the RNZ Mid-day Report that I heard that on, but here's a different news source https://english.alarabiya.net/en/business/markets/2020/03/28/Negative-prices-seen-in-one-corner-of-US-oil-market

ironically sticking to the rules can end up worse for social distancing when recreating than flouting the rules... its not like its impossible to social distance when out exercising in cities its just a fair no are pretty slack at it, i can go to a park with a closed road but people are still flouting the safe distancing, then theres those who meet someone they know and stop and yacka within safe distance, i'm amazed there arent still more infections but i read something by a physicist who said the risk of getting infected beyond a meter esp outdoors, is almost nill unless someone sneezes right at you... and i'm thinking that he may be right considering the lockdown seems to be working and i've seen so many break safe distancing rules, theres several narrow tracks on the hill where i live i've been avoiding but no shortage of people who are using them and have to shoulder past each other. because of all the kauri dieback track closures theres not that many decent hill walks around up north and the good ones get hammered and can be goat tracks that there is often no chance to stand oout of the way and let someone past, in theory you'd think they'd just close a track because you cant social distance on it, but they are technically still open...

Obviously the chance of being infected through casual non-contact with someone who comes within less than 2m of you is infinitesimal on an individual case basis. However, if 4 million people (or 6 billion) are doing it constantly every single day then all those tiny probabilities add up very quickly. Everyone seems to get wrapped up in their small picture experiences and misses the big picture.

In the early days of publicity on this, the Ministry of Health was talking about close contacts as generally being people you'd have spent 15 minutes or longer nearby. I remember people asking about situations like a cyclist racing past a pedestrian too close, and Ashley Bloomfield sort of dismissed any possible infection as being extremely unlikely. Officials aren't really referring to details like that any more, at least in public. That's either because more recent research has shown otherwise or because the messages were just getting very confusing. I think @Dodgydave is probably onto it. If you're out on the street and someone walks past without giving you a full 2 metres of space, or if you're on a narrower bit of a track and the best you can do is turn sideways and face away from someone as they walk past, then don't panic too much about it. That's not an excuse to casually ignore the 2 metre advice, though. Covid-19 droplets don't have a tape measure. The 2 metre thing is an approximation that's been derived to minimise likely infection but still allow an element of practicality. The closer people everywhere are on average in larger numbers, however, the more likely it is that cross-infection will occur.