We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.
I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists
When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.
So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.
It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.
It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.
I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0]
It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.