> 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.
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.
Per https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat..., they're at 13 deaths per million citizens. The US is at 2,916.
A single nursing home in New Jersey lost more staff and residents to COVID in a few weeks than the entire country of New Zealand did in two years. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/nyregion/coronavirus-nj-a...