The first COVID lockdown was March to May 2020. The Alert Levels system was introduced and NZ entered various phases throughout 2020 to December 2021, when the COVID Protection Framework was introduced. Early on, many Māori communities established their own checkpoints to protect the health of vulnerable communities. Modelling data for impact on Māori predicted COVID would be 50 percent more likely to be fatal for Māori owing to underlying health, and socio-economic factors.