New Zealand gets the unfortunate legacy of having to share the "zero COVID" mantra with a small group of fellow partners like China (which the NZ PM promoted harder than any other leader via speaker circuits). But otherwise I don't know much about NZ to critique.
Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China.
And it's probably wise for countries to be using COVID as a test run for something worse. We live in the age of pandemics now, and will probably get hit by something worse eventually. Something like an airborne Ebola strain (50% mortality) or airborne Rabies strain (100% mortality) are going to require a rapid, whole-of-society response to shut it down. If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
> Zero Covid may actually be plausible for small, isolated island nations with limited entry points, like NZ, even without locking everyone inside their homes like in China.
So why doesn't Japan and Sri Lanka and Hong Kong and Taiwan and every island Caribbean/Pacific nation not have limited zero-COVID policies right now? It works right? The data shows Delta is still kicking.
At least be honest they made a very serious gamble with their citizen's freedoms, the economic well being of the poor, and the livelihood of small businesses and it didn't work. And every time a compromise is made in the future it will be easier to make the second time.
You can argue it might have worked, people were scared, they were working with limited information, the media cheered them on for acting boldly, etc, etc. But that's how we evolve. We learn from mistakes. Which is critically important for discourse going forward.
Pretty much everyone here lives in dense areas like the rest of the world. Limited entry points probably helped though, and being small more to do with faster, more regional decisions rather than the China way of there is COVID? Lock everything down.
>If anything like that happens, the US and other countries that made a complete wreck of our response are going to be fucked.
A 50% or 100% mortality rate would keep even the most pro-liberty people home. The issue is that COVID was nowhere near the civilization killer that is was made out to be. Some countries/states recognized this and rightly decided to not lock society down.
The problem is, COVID19 was essentially a zero-day, an exploit against human physiology we had never seen in the wild before, and didn't know how bad it would be in foresight.
Any response to a novel outbreak that spreads rapidly, like COVID, needs to err on the side of caution initially, until we have better knowledge of the short and long term effects.
And it wasn't a civilization killer, but US excess mortality rate during COVID exceeded total US deaths of WWII, among other great cullings. It was worth taking seriously and striving for a competent response.
NZ does not have a zero covid strategy, and never did. Pretty much all of NZ's covid restrictions have been removed, and there are thousands of reported cases at the moment.
> The country moved to a nationwide lockdown on 17 August 2021, after the detection of one new local case outside of quarantine in Auckland.
This is the very definition of "zero-COVID".
They didn't abandon zero-COVID for another 5 months (Oct 21) when they finally admitted the data showed it didn't work.
Of course it's good they stopped using the strategy. But I remember vividly how the NZ PM promoted zero-COVID (and this was cheered by the media in Canada) as a working strategy until it no longer made sense politically or scientifically.
China has the bulk of the blame for continuing this failed strategy, but they were far from alone in the reasons why it was adopted it in the first place.
> They didn't abandon zero-COVID for another 5 months (Oct 21) when they finally admitted the data showed it didn't work.
This doesn't sound right to me. I live in Australia, and we adopted a very similar policy. Lock down migration until a large percentage of the population was vaccinated. When the vaccine was rolled out, the restrictions eased. It wasn't because "the data showed it didn't work".
And fwiw "lockdown" for the most part meant restrictions on international travel. Most residents got to lead very regular lives for theozt part.
So Auckland didnt lockdown their entire city after a single case?
That's exactly what China has been repeatedly criticized for doing in Shanghai and Bejing and elsewhere (and is still doing today).
Of course NZ stopped doing it after 5 months, after reviewing the data (I mean I hope they were reviewing data and evaluating the human costs).
From what I can tell the initial order (after a single case) was for 7 days in Aukland and 3 days for all surrounding cities. How long it actually lasted I'm not sure, but this merely is one example of an idea that was promoted globally.
You can pretend an entire city spending 7 days locked in their house, after a single COVID case in a city of 1.6 million, is not much to ask of people. But we might have different value systems.
> You can pretend an entire city spending 7 days locked in their house
You do understand that people were not actually locked in their houses in NZ? There were reports of people literally being locked in to their apartments in China, but don't confuse "lock down" with "locked in" when it comes to NZ.
In practice lock downs (at least in Aus) were stopping people going into offices or non-essential places of business, or congregating in parks or other places. Whilst definitely an imposition on people, it wasn't equivalent to what was described as happening in China.
Of course they stopped it eventually because the costs were unsustainable, and it was never intended to be a permanent solution.
The whole point was to go hard at the start, get the population vaccinated, then open back up.
I haven't checked recent numbers, but last time I did, the number of deaths in NZ/AU per capita were far lower than in the US. Which you might not consider worthwhile, but we might have different value systems.
