Mary-Lyn Chambers often wakes in the night gasping for breath. On bad days, when a winter chill seeps into her Auckland home, the film writer and director feels as though her lungs are damp. In October last year, the New Zealand citizen fled Los Angeles, where she had lived for 20 years, and arrived back here to be closer to family and friends.

Speaking by Zoom from her Auckland home, the 52-year-old describes 2020 as “a s...box’’. Diagnosed with Covid in early March 2020, she wasn’t vaccinated and was one of the incredibly unlucky sufferers to be struck with long Covid. For 14 weeks, she was ill, at times struggling to breathe. She will never forget week eight. “I was no longer infectious but I often couldn’t breathe. It was scary. I felt like I had GladWrap wrapped around my chest.’’

She’s still not fully recovered and thinks her immune system has taken a battering. She has had five colds so far this winter. While she recovered from Covid about 14 months ago, she says: “I worry what this virus has done to me long-term. I’m no longer healthy like I used to be because of Covid.’’

Chambers is sharing her experience because she thinks New Zealanders have been cut off from the true horrors of Covid: for those questioning vaccination or the lockdown, she can’t say enough how important it is to stop Delta running rampant. “The stakes feel so much higher this time. If Delta isn’t caught, then we will be just like the rest of the world.’’

On Tuesday, the short film writer and director planned to leave her Auckland house for the first time since the lockdown for her first Pfizer jab. “I can’t wait to get vaccinated,’’ she says. “I reconnected with a friend recently and he told me he wasn’t going to get the vaccine... I couldn’t believe it. You don’t know how your body is going to react to Covid. And I told him, ‘Oh my god, at all costs you should not get Covid’.’’

Two of her friends died from Covid. Her Denver-based sister also had long Covid, and months after she recovered she was diagnosed with myocardial heart inflammation – a proven side-effect of long Covid. “She was on her spin bike and her heart wouldn’t stop racing. Her doctor told her she should do nothing for a few weeks or her heart might just stop one day.’’

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Chambers is trying to get the vaccination message out to her New Zealand friends since she returned home. As a protected nation, she thinks we have been sheltered by the horror of the pandemic, which is a good thing but has left us naive. “When I returned back here and I told people I had had Covid, they often looked at me incredulously. I am so grateful that I’m still alive and I’m so indebted to New Zealand for having me here,’’ she says.

Covid has affected Chambers emotionally, too. Fighting back tears, she says: “Even this lockdown brings back the anxiety I felt. A lot of us abroad, we closed down for 18 months. It’s really challenging mentally, physically and emotionally to go through this again.’’

Chamber’s comments come as one leading vaccine expert calls for urgency to the vaccination programme. Worried that New Zealand has the lowest vaccination rate in the OECD, Dr Fran Priddy, clinical Director of Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand – Ohu Kaupare Huaketo, says: “New Zealand has been vulnerable for many, many months. The unvaccinated population is a breeding ground for mutations. We need to move on this.’’

On Friday 56,843 people were vaccinated in one day, a record, boosting the number of people with one shot to 34 per cent of the country, and 19 per cent with both.

While the Government’s initial plan was to spend the year vaccinating the country and allow the borders to open sometime next year, Dr Priddy says now that Delta has slipped in our mass vaccination centres should expand to boost volumes, and there should be work-placed and school-based vaccination programmes.

As long as medical staff administer vaccines, she says New Zealand no longer has the luxury of sticking to the old timetable. “ We should be opening up many more vaccination centres to increase volumes and probably getting another vaccine here. I think (the Government) could be more public about the urgency of getting vaccinated now.’’

She says there is good safety data for 12-18 year-olds and more is coming through for younger children. For everyone, there is protection for up to eight weeks between jabs. “I’ll get my kids vaccinated when it opens up to them.’’

A month ago, Kiwi-born Moana Moore tested positive with Covid after doing a home-based test. Her daughter, Poppy, had been self-isolating in their home in Hertfordshire, England, after being exposed to someone with Covid, so Moana had to check she didn’t have the virus before going into her office.

Moana, a global compliance lawyer for a London investment company, had been fully vaccinated, which she thought would offer some protection. However, she knew it wouldn’t necessarily stop her getting the delta strain, which is more contagious than previous variants.

For a week, she suffered Covid symptoms which she now describes as equivalent to a bad cold: a dry cough, loss of smell and body aches. “But it wasn’t too bad, and on Sunday I got up and started cleaning the house,’’ she says. “It felt like a bad cold with tiredness, but it never got worse than that for me and I think that was the vaccine doing its thing.’’

Days after she came down with it, her husband, Peter, son Conor, 22, and Poppy, 15, were also struck with Covid as the virus swept through their household. Only daughter Natasha, 19, didn’t catch it, possibly because she already had an asymptomatic case before or the vaccine protected her.

Moana and Peter can’t say enough about how they think the vaccine protected them from becoming severely ill. Both were fully vaccinated with Astra Zeneca in May. Conor had one jab of Moderna, while Natasha was also partly vaccinated. Poppy was too young to be eligible. Says Moana: “I can’t tell you how relieved I was to get my first jab.’’

Peter suffered the worst. Says Moana: “I do think Pete would have ended up in hospital if he hadn’t had the vaccine. We had close friends who were hospitalised and sadly passed away pre-vaccine. But we don’t know anyone that has been hospitalised since they have had at least one vaccine. With Pete, the fever and body aches were bad and he continues to feel tired. But, most importantly, the illness never took grip of his chest as we had feared all along. We really felt like the vaccine stopped that.’’

Experts stress that double vaccination protects against severe symptoms and hospitalisation and even one jab offers some protection.

Poppy hasn’t got her sense of smell back after six weeks, but her other symptoms were mild. Moana doesn’t know anyone who is vaccine hesitant in the UK. She raves about the vaccine and the way it is being rolled out through the UK, there are walk-up vaccine rooms and a vaccine bus regularly rolls through their town centre.

The Moores are just beginning to return to normal life: returning to school and to work from next month, socialising and being back at pubs and restaurants again. Moana shakes her head talking about the stress of living with Covid for 18 months. While she has been proud of the New Zealand response so far, she worries now about family and friends here. “I think your lockdowns are important. But there is a route out now and that route is vaccination. I think NZ needs to get the vaccination programme finished as quickly as possible.’’