New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Tuesday that Australian and New Zealand residents will be able to travel between the two countries without having to quarantine. The trans-Tasman travel bubble will start on Sunday, April 18 at 11:59 p.m.

“This is an important step forward in our COVID response and represents an arrangement I do not believe we have seen in any other part of the world. That is, safely opening up international travel to another country while continuing to pursue a strategy of elimination and a commitment to keeping the virus out,” Arden said.

New Zealand’s Parliament unanimously approved legislation on Wednesday allowing mothers and their partners three days of paid bereavement leave after a miscarriage or stillbirth. Previously, employees were provided with paid leave in case of a stillbirth, the new bill now extends those benefits for those who lose a pregnancy at any point.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern reported that New Zealand has purchased enough of Pfizer/BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine to inoculate its entire population. The government has signed an advanced purchases agreement with the vaccine manufacturer for an additional 8.5 million doses. Pfizer/BioNTech's Covid-19 vaccine will be the country's primary vaccine.

Whilst the Pfizer vaccine does need to be kept at ultra-cold temperatures, this challenge is offset by only having to deal with one vaccine, rather than multiple vaccines with multiple protocols. It will simplify our vaccine roll out," Arden said.

Travel pass – a Covid-19 vaccination passport app developed by the International Air Transport Association – will be tested on Air New Zealand flights between Auckland and Sydney from April on “to streamline the health verification process to help customers know what they need to take their next international trip safely”.

On Wednesday, Facebook announced users in Australian will no longer be able to find nor share news from neither local or international sources as a response to a proposed Australian legislation that would force platforms to pay publishers for news content.

William Easton, the managing director of Facebook Australia & New Zealand, wrote in a blog post that the "proposed law fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between our platform and publishers who use it to share news content."

“It has left us facing a stark choice: attempt to comply with a law that ignores the realities of this relationship, or stop allowing news content on our services in Australia. With a heavy heart, we are choosing the latter,” he added.

New Zealand schools across the country will be stocked with free period products from June, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced at Fairfield College in Hamilton on Thursday.

”There’s lots of barriers that shouldn’t exist for our young people,” Ardern said. “And one of the things stopping our young people from going to school is an issue called period poverty. One in 12 of our students possibly miss school because they don’t have access to period products. That’s just not right and not in a country like New Zealand.”

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that genomic sequencing showed that the recent three Covid-19 cases were the variant B117, the more potent variant first detected in the UK, resulting in an Auckland-wide lockdown.

The Ministry of Healthy announced it was investigating the Auckland cases, prioritising "close contacts and casual plus contacts to be tested so we can understand any risk in the community."

Sydney's Lowy Institute assessed the Covid-19 response of 98 countries on six different criteria – including cases, deaths and testing – and ranked New Zealand's response to the virus the best. The other countries that made the top 10 are Vietnam, Taiwan, Thailand, Cyprus, Rwanda, Iceland, Australia, Latvia and Sri Lanka. The United States, Mexico, Colombia and Iran and Brazil were in the bottom five, with Brazil being ranked at the bottom.

The Australian government's chief medical adviser, Brendan Murphy, has told ABC TV that lifting substantial border restrictions is not expected in 2021, despite an early start to the vaccination campaign. Australia's borders have been closed to travellers since March 2020 to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

"I think that we'll go most of this year with still substantial border restrictions – even if we have a lot of the population vaccinated, we don't know whether that will prevent transmission of the virus," Professor Murphy said.

"And it's likely that quarantine will continue for some time. One of the things about this virus is that the rule book has been made up as we go."

Two travellers from the United Kingdom were found to be infected with the newly detected UK Covid-19 strain after arriving in New South Wales, Australia. The two individuals have been placed in hotel quarantine.