What was the point of all of New Zealand's draconian lockdowns then? They had all the negative lockdown effects for no reason, and still ended up with just as much of a COVID problem as the rest of the world that didn't have them.
> What was the point of all of New Zealand's draconian lockdowns then?
Keeping deaths down. 84% of the country now has at least one dose, and half have three. Australia took the same approach - strict measures until widespread vaccination.
New Zealand has 65. Even normalized for population, our per capita death rate is over 200 times theirs. Many stupid decisions are involved in that, but it's hard to argue NZ didn't do a good job here.
Have you ever been to New Zealand, or Australia for that matter?
I have.
It's hard for most people to understand how utterly isolated they are unless they've traveled there.
Countries like the US with land borders aren't able to isolate. The US has tens of thousands of people enter every day in unregulated fashion, across the southern border alone.
New Zealand successfully locked their country down, and delayed COVID infection until a vastly milder variant that was more contagious showed up. It's hard to think a non-island nation could successfully achieve the same strategy. Every single person who enters the nation is forced to go through an airport, or far more rarely, a seaport. That confers an ability to strictly regulate entry for citizens and visitors alike.
There are too many variables to assume containment was the primary driver here.
Obesity is a massive contributor to death, and we all know that no country in Western Europe is remotely close to the US in that category. Sweden took the opposite approach of New Zealand, for example, and has a lower death rate than the strictest US states did, and lower than most European countries. They are also infinitely healthier than the US as a population, which represents a confounding variable.
Even within the US, Utah performed better than Colorado, yet the two states are culturally dissimilar and Utah has a far more conservative government, despite them bordering each other and having similar climates.
I think it's far too early to truly understand what policies were working and which were not. I'm looking forward to a year from now when there will be a lot clearer information and less egos involved.
And even after they did all that, they still had a big problem, just out of phase from everybody else, and they didn't have any natural immunity protection.
I can't wait for the conclusions in 10 years that are based on much less heated analyses. People will probably finally agree that island nations that have high levels of adherence to health edicts can forestall massive outbreaks, at least temporarily, but that is not a strategy that extends outside of those situations.
Our "big" problem is Omicron, which so far seems less lethal than all the other strains we were able to dodge.
Incidentally, any evidence that "natural immunity protection" is so much better than 3 doses of Pfizer that it would have been worth the excess deaths?
I'm sorry, are you asking for some sort of paper that shows one thing or another? Most of my conclusions about this are based on consultations with the epidemiologists and disease scientists at my employer (a pharma company that vends COVID tests and treatments, among other things). I trust their verbal communications a lot more than what gets published in the literature now.
My point is that none of the analysis being done now controls for anything and there are a ton of different reporting systems which are being compared and people are pointing at one country or another as "having done the right thing".
We simply don't have the epistemic certaintly to declare that specific techniques worked or didn't. That sort of certainty comes only after decades of people working the data over and over to identify and correct for a lot of stuff missed in the heat of the pandemic.
Like, let's say that natural immunity acquired from exposure to baseline SARS-CoV-2 meant that 99% of your population wouldn't die when other variants came through.
Would the deaths from the baseline virus be worth the protection conveyed against the other variants?
What _is_ the effectiveness of natural immunity from baseline Covid against Delta or Omicron? There must be some research, surely.
There are a lot peer reviewed papers on this topic. Feel free to research them if you'd like.
A few studies to google:
CDC's January study, although that wasn't peer reviewed since it's published in MWMR, and those aren't peer reviewed.
Israel's large N study on natural immunity compared to not-previously infected, vaccinated population
Qatar's study with a sample size of 80,000 (If i recall the sample correctly)
Natural immunity conferred greater protection than vaccination alone for Delta. That's clear in these papers. Probably was not the case for previous variants, because the vaccines were generated from the earlier strain. I find it odd that there wasn't a concerted effort to "update" the vaccines with the newer genetic material for the more recent strains. Perhaps it wasn't sensible due to continued mutations inevitable with the virus.
The problem was hospitals needed to discharge folks who were still stick to free up beds for even more sick people. Traditionally nursing homes are where those folks go. And unfortunately these people were likely still covid+. It took awhile for the govt to create dedicated post hospitalization covid recovery units.
The alternative interpretation is that New Zealand's lockdowns avoided all the previous waves (which killed hundreds of thousands of people in the US, for example), but did not avoid the Omicron wave. So far, NZ has only reported 65 covid deaths. That number will surely rise with the current wave, but I think it's a wild exaggeration to say that they have had "just as much of a covid problem as the rest of the world".
Vaccination didn't and doesn't reduce transmission. It protects you from serious illness and death if/when you get it. The whole transmission protection meme needs to die.
It has a trivial effect at the population level wrt the spread of covid.
It does reduce transmission, I was reading a research paper out of the UK, and while vaccinated people who got infected hit the same peak viral load as someone unvaccinated, they were at the peak viral load for a far shorter period of time.
I can try to locate the link if you're interested.
Actually pretty happy about how our government managed it. We had 2 years of relatively calm times where there was no Covid and long periods where life was pretty normal. By the time Delta came most people managed to get fully vaccinated in time so the outbreak was tiny, then once Omicron hit and cases have started to peak we've got most the population vaccinated and a significant portion boosted, so the illness is quite mild for most people and still life here feels pretty normal. We just had a case in our household where only our son, who had gotten one dose of Pfizer already, got it and was a super mild case and neither my wife or I caught it from him.
Compared to what I've seen on the news over the last 2 years from countries overseas we've had a really easy time.
NZ didn't have draconian lockdowns in the plural, their draconian policy was in the singular and applied to travellers from abroad. Children attended school and team sports as usual, for example.
Also, having a covid wave with 94% of adults fully vaccinated isn't "just as much of a covid problem" as the waves in unvaccinated populations elsewhere last year.
NZ had two very strong lockdowns (starting March 2020 and August 2021), with an intervening period of zero covid. Whether one would consider them “Draconian”, I’m not sure, but it certainly wasn’t life as normal
Level 4 lockdown was draconian I would say. Level 3 was like level 4 but you could get fast food, so a little less draconian. Level 2 was pretty much normal but those who could work from home had to work from home.
But we all just did what we needed to do. I think we got a great result from that in the end, and the government adjusted the Covid response to the public opinion as we eventually tired of lockdowns and had access to and good uptake of vaccines.
I would give our Covid response 8/10. Only thing that could have been better is we got the vaccine a few months early then it would have been more like 9/10 as we wouldn't have been rushing to vaccinate just as Delta was hitting and rushing to boost while Omicron is hitting.
Where I live, the pediatric psychiatry clinics are still badly overloaded due to children who coped and then, when school and social activities were harshly constrained, didn't cope. I had the impression that NZ's lockdowns, such as they were, avoided that kind of severity.
They have definitely avoided the vast majority of deleterious effects from an overloaded health system, but it's definitely very harsh and severe to be instructed that you're now not allowed to leave your house for a month particularly when by world standards for freedom you are used to ranking right at the top. I think it meets the colloquial usage of draconian. Though I would say that word has a negative connotation indicating ones discontent at the state of things imposed on you by an authority. In my experience the vast majority of people initially supported the lockdowns and compliance was very high as we figured we just should do what we need to do and not fuss too much about it. I myself never labelled it draconian as I was in support of it, but those who were not in support of it at the time used that term.
What was the point? Making sure people didn't die until we had viable vaccines, basically.
So yep, we're hitting widespread Omicron now, but a) it appears to have far less severe health impacts compared to strains like Delta and b) 95.2% of Kiwis have had two doses of Pfizer, 72.5% the booster.
It provided valuable data points for a denser mapping of the possibility space!
At the beginning various strategies were proposed. A few looked utterly bizarre: IIRC the UK plan was to "keep the schools open so the kid can catch it".
In retrospect, some start standing out as better - but data is still coming so it's too early to say for sure.
The current strain is much less lethal than its predecessor, so being infected now is the much better option. It is an illusion that many countries could have used these approaches as countries like New Zealand or Australia though.
Well, that's not really what they're saying. They're saying "do get your vaccines if going to NZ", but the same government is also saying "do get your vaccines" without any ifs, so arguably the travel advice is close to a no-op.
New Zealand has 13 deaths per million residents. The US has nearly 3,000 deaths per million.
Vaccination decouples case numbers from severe disease and death. The calculus on avoiding cases changes significantly once you get the population well vaccinated.
New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave and deaths lag considerably, so it's a bit early to be drawing this comparison. I would agree they're likely to experience a lower death count than the U.S. but not by this magnitude.
Also, presumably the epidemiological factors which are causing Americans to die from COVID at higher rates are also likely to apply to Americans who are infected while traveling to New Zealand.
> New Zealand is just at the beginning of its first major wave...
Yes, and they're entering it with a well-vaccinated population, especially in the vulnerable age groups. Even with variants in play, evidence points heavily to that meaning cases won't lead to significant numbers of severe disease and death.
That's fine, but it has nothing to do with travel warnings. The US state department didn't tell unvaccinated people to avoid travel to NZ, it made a blanket recommendation.
You started this subthread by making a comment about "burning rooms", implying that the US situation is somehow worse than New Zealand in the present moment. Historical trends are what they are, but currently, irrespective of aggregate historical death rate, NZ is doing worse than the US. There's probably a greater risk of catching Covid right now in NZ than there is in the US.
(But this is all a silly discussion. The horse is out of the barn, Covid is literally everywhere, and these travel restrictions do nothing but cause pain. About the best you can say is that state department "recommendations" are the least absurd of an overall absurd response.)
That would not be a correct presumption. Americans who travel to New Zealand are not at all representative of the general population. For one thing they are significantly more affluent on average. I suspect they're also older, and less likely to be suffering from severe chronic co-morbid conditions. For example, end-stage renal disease patients were heavily overrepresented among US COVID-19 deaths. Not many such people would get on a 16 hour flight to Auckland under any conditions.
That's all fine and I am broadly in support of the statement "people without major COVID risk factors should not take any special precautions or avoid travel to areas experiencing high case rates." My comment was simply addressed to the claim that the U.S. is currently doing much worse than New Zealand in some way that is relevant to travel advisories.
I think NZ will fare better by orders of magnitude than the US because NZ had one of the best responses in the world and the US had one of the worst responses in the world.
Case numbers are mostly irrelevant and don't mean much one way or another. Official case counts vary a lot based on the extent of testing and reporting. If you test more then you find more cases. In the US, the CDC estimated that only about a quarter of infections were ever counted as cases.
What actually matters is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths.
And we're all going to be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that happens at home or abroad hardly matters.
