If you were worried about our slow roll out, then Delta arriving here early than expected might be a good thing for us on balance. 

This is exactly what we needed to get vaccination rates up. 

There wasn’t any urgency before.    

Officials could hardly get 12% of invited people to turn up to the Manukau mass vaccination event. 

We didn’t have enough older people getting their jabs, that’s part of the reason the government had to open the system up to everyone from September. 

Even Ashley Bloomfield hadn’t yet got his jab despite his age category opening up nearly two weeks ago. 

Many of us were acting like we had all the time in the world.    

But then Delta arrived. 

And yesterday - first day of the lockdown - we saw a massive surge in jab bookings. 

The Prime Minister said at 1pm it was the busiest day on the booking's website yet with a record 195K people signing up. 

That is great result. 

That means that we’ll probably get to a higher vaccination rate, faster than we would have without an outbreak. 

And what that means is that because more of a us will get jabbed faster, we will be able to move on faster and get on with the plan to start prising our border open next year. 

The worst thing that could’ve happened to us is that we got to 1 January next year hoping to start easing up on the MIQ rules for double-jabbed travellers and then realised our vaccination cover was too low to do that. 

I know a bunch of people will be angry at me for this. 

They’ll misread this as me saying its good Delta has arrived and wishing death and illness on people. 

But the fact is Delta was always going to arrive. It was an inevitability. 

And it might be the only thing that would’ve got many of us hurrying up and booking that jab.