Yes, she must surely rank at the top of the heap of western leaders. Here in British Columbia, we have very roughly the same population but whereas NZ has had twelve deaths because Ardern took early and decisive action based on the science, we've had 86 deaths because of hand-wringing and indecision.
Are the 86 deaths attestable only to the BC premier? Or could it also be the fault of the federal government?
Presumably the leader of a small nation has a wider latitude for action to them than the leader of a similarly sized region which is contained in a larger country.
BC dragged its feet on implementing a lockdown, the federal government had to be dragged kicking and screaming into closing its borders. Travelers from China weren't even quarantined throughout February, for instance.
Anecdotally, I have heard that Chinese-Canadian communities took the issue seriously on their own, and started practicing social distancing in February... Which may well have helped.
It's looking better than Ontario and Quebec, but it could have looked even better, had it acted sooner.
It was a Chinese Canadian family who reported to BC Health that a family member who went back to China had tested positive. The individual had visited two health clinics in BC with symptoms, and was dismissed, before going back to China at the end of the trip. I believe this was one of the first 3 cases reported in BC. This was commendable and very forward thinking of the family. Many times there is a stigma in Eastern countries about being the early carrier of disease etc.
I think that is being a bit harsh on BC - it is looking pretty good compared to basically all the rest of North America; not perfect, but acted sensibly for the most part.
Yes, but considering eg the shitshow down south or in Quebec, that is damning it with faint praise. The fact remains that BC has seven times the deaths of New Zealand.
One thing BC has in its favour is a reasonably common-sense population that more or less understands the gravity of the situation, particularly the Chinese community. People have been good with social distancing and so forth. But BC Parks should have closed sooner, Bonnie Henry should not have been encouraging people to "continue to go to Whistler", and so forth.
>Unlike the countries that declared "war on Covid-19", the government's message was that of a country coming together. It urged people to "Unite Against Covid-19". Ms Ardern has repeatedly called the country "our team of five million".
The wonders of having a young woman in charge rather than a testosterone-laden septuagenarian. Being German I'm also glad Merkel is in charge over here and her measured response rather than banging on the war drums reassured me as well.
New Zealand also is a relatively isolated warm island nation with far less international travel to it than literally the rest of the Western World. So please excuse me with all of the tribute to it for its performance.
Sure, but you described NZ as a "warm island nation", you didn't say that it's warm there lately. Where I am in Minneapolis it will be in the 70s–90s in a couple months, but I wouldn't call Minneapolis a "warm city".
I'm reading Pathway of the Birds, about Polynesian voyaging, navigation and settlement with a focus on NZ, and there's a whole chapter "Settling New Zealand: Adapting to a Cool Land", which was something the early settlers had to do because they came from genuine warm islands in tropical Polynesia.
I dunno, even up in BC here it's been warmer than that these last couple weeks and I would in no way describe where I live as a 'warm place'. At least on the coast. It gets pretty warm in the interior in the summer though.
Still worth a shoutout for shutting down even with very few cases per day. If you're going to end up with a quarantine regardless that's the best time to completely shut down. There were 5 new cases yesterday and there doesn't seem to be major instances of an undiagnosed population. They have a chance of completely eliminating this internally.
Australia is the same way at the moment too. 20 new cases total yesterday and there doesn't seem to be a major section of the population undiagnosed. The new cases seem to be coming from known pockets of infection (people living together, etc.).
There's a real chance life may get back to normal in these two nations with the exception of international travel without waiting for a cure/vaccine.
New Zealand has a healthy tourist industry, and Auckland is effectively the capital of Polynesia, so it has a lot more air travel than you might think. Also, if isolation were such a large factor, why is New Zealand doing so much better than (for example) Iceland? NZ has a lower growth rate than Fiji, Maldives, Saint Kitts and Nevis. Isolation might be a factor, but it seems to have less effect on outcomes than when and how nations responded.
We can actually answer these questions rather than just guessing.
In 2018, 3.82 million people flew into NZ, an increase of 1.2 million over the previous year. Iceland meanwhile received 2.3 million people in 2018, most from the United States, which is in line with historical averages of around 2 million.
> New Zealand doing so much better than (for example) Iceland?
They are only doing so much better if you define better solely in terms of deaths (about 14x per capita). The difference is that New Zealand locked down; Iceland had much more modest restrictions (and did very well overall with containing the epidemic - a bit better than say the locked down Bay Area)
The interesting question is if "deaths/capita" is the correct and only metric. Both countries are basically at the end of their curve and Iceland lets say might lose about 200 years of life (using some worse case guesses for currently hospitalized) or about 5 hours a person.
What's better for the average person? A 4 week lockdown or life expectancy dropping by 5 hours?
Kiwi’s have good common sense and when needed can pull their shit together. I’ve compared few countries in Google’s Mobility report and no other country reduced their activity as much as NZ!
But you are excused, you don't have to comment at all.
But since you did comment, are you certain that lack of immigration and "warmth" explain the discrepancy between their results and America's? Or Italy's? Or Canada's? Or (as another commentator points out) British Columbia?
Please go into more detail about the relative impact of these factors, and why you think they are more important than the choices New Zealand made.
British Columbia is part of Canada and thus borders America. It has a city of ~3 million people (Vancouver), which is an hour's drive from Seattle (pop ~4 million) and the US west coast. It has one of the most active ports in North America and is a jumping off point for cruise ships, overseas travel to Asia and numerous other flows of people and good. The other user is making a fairly dishonest comparison of BC and New Zealand by looking just at population and none of the other factors that have led to the differing results during the pandemic.
Accusing people of dishonesty is not aligned with the HN guidelines. If you disagree with their point of view, perhaps criticize the comment on its merits, rather than accusing a fellow contributor of dishonesty.
There's a difference between accusing the contributor of being dishonest and saying the argument is dishonest - e.g. ignoring central contridictory facts.
It's not "warmth" but Summer. Drop the smug attitude and fairly compare it to other places in the Southern hemisphere. It's not a simple climate difference but an inversion of seasons.
We are witnessing great success due to the leadership acumen of certain female heads of state (Merkel, included) which in this case (and Germany's) is rooted in science and driven by data. Why be so dismissive?
Current stats: upvoted 3 times and downvoted 4 times, which is one way of proving that we suffer empathy deficiency on HN. In fact, I don't think many on HN know what empathy is. Proves the point that commenters that say NZ is not special in its handling of the crisis don't understand what empathy is or its role in successful leadership during a life/death emergency.
EDIT:
It could also be 1 user using 4 different accounts that they've accumulated some time and karma under (so they look like legitimate user accounts) ... HN makes it impossible to tell if that's the case since they hide stats on who up votes and who downvotes.
I agree on the isolation. I lived in NZ. As someone from North America, it was strange how isolated it felt. Especially outside of Auckland. As for density, I disagree. Most of the country is empty but the cities are surprisingly dense by North American standards considering the population size.
I've never been to NZ but the data is utterly against that. The most dense city in NZ (Auckland) has 2418 people/km^2, and Christchurch is about half that. Wellington is 1918. [0]
By contrast every US city in this table [1] is way above that, with the lowest being 3889.4. (New Orleans, surprisingly, is a mere 783 [2].)
That's interesting. I wonder how they calculated the area. There's no way Yonkers is twice as dense as Auckland in a practical sense (I would guess it's similar). As for Wellington, there's a very limited amount of space to build on because of the topography. As a result, houses are small, streets are narrow, cars are small (I had a difficult time driving a tiny hatchback). The CBD is unusually big and dense for a city with a metro population smaller than Madison, Wisconsin. The airport is shoehorned in to the only flat space in the region. So why does it have a low density? I'm assuming undeveloped regions are being counted here. I suspect density in terms of "used space" is quite high. Totally anecdotal obviously.
Louisiana: Home to one of the largest commercial shipping ports in the world, serving as an import/export hub for the largest national economy in the world. Has extensive land borders with said nation and large amounts of interstate travel daily.
New Zealand: Has a small export market largely focused on agriculture and a small tourism market. Is an island nation over 1300 miles away from the nearest other significant economy. All movement in/out of the nation has to go through tightly controlled ports or airports.
I don't know if I would call New Zealand's tourism market small. Small compared to New York or London maybe but relative to the size of the country, it's GDP and population? 3.8 million people visited New Zealand in 2019[1]. The population of New Zealand is only 4.8 million.
I don't understand why HN users always jump into these things like it's a cage fight. The right way for you to respond is to help us collectively arrive at truth (which your qualitative statement aids mildly in) and leave out all the parts that claim bad faith from your fellow users. Jesus Christ, I even included density which points the opposite way. Now because I don't have a preconceived notion of which direction I want the results to show why NZ is performing better, I can conclude that the result is either:
* The factors described are washed out by the other factors
* These factors don't have a significant impact
* It isn't any of these that determines difference in outcome between NZ and others but action taken
No wonder you guys hate social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram if you run around calling everyone insincere at the first sign of the mildest degree of disagreement.
Fortunately, Taiwan exists and is better than everyone else so we have a high-water mark for competence to compare to.
Denser than America, cooler than Lousiana, closer to Wuhan than any part of America, more travel to/from China, poorer than America, better than America at dealing with this crisis.
As a reference, here is a map that shows international tourism arrivals per country from 2018. I don't know if it proves any causes in relation to your point about international travel but it shows some correlation.
Apparently there are different strains of Covid-19 floating around. There has been speculation that NZ (and Australia) may have largely been hit by a less aggressive version of the virus than, say, Europe.
NZ gets tourists from everywhere (3.6M tourists in nation with 5M population), and 1/3 of cases are NZers returning home from all over the world (we travel internationally a lot).
I don’t have the sequencing, but there is no reason to think NZ would only “catch” one strain.
> The deadliest mutations in the Zhejiang patients had also been found in most patients across Europe, while the milder strains were the predominant varieties found in parts of the United States, such as Washington State, according to their paper.
> A separate study had found that New York strains had been imported from Europe. The death rate in New York was similar to that in many European countries, if not worse.
It's no so much that a particular area only has one strain, but that the predominant strain that takes hold may have more favourable outcomes.
There is zero reason to think there is a “predominant strain that takes hold” in NZ. We get a lot of tourists from Asia, Europe and the US. Early on, the majority of cases in NZ were returning kiwis, who returned from all over the world.
NZ is highly connected because (a) it is a world tourist destination and (b) NZers travel all over the world (including a lot to Europe).
And yet the article i've linked to has researchers saying different areas (which are as well, if not, far better connected than NZ) have predominant strains with differing characteristics.
There is rank speculation about strains and temperatures - some of it based on case rates and death rates which is just pointless if comparing NZ and say the US because our situations are radically different.
1/3 of NZ infections are returning NZers, making up the vast majority of initial infections detected weeks ago.
The community transmissions are spread around the country, and unlikely to have a single super-spreader as the source. Our health system (including ICU wards) is vastly under-utilised at present, so any cases are getting the best care possible, and we have first world healthcare. There is no elective surgery at present, and our hospitals have been funded by our socialised healthcare. We could do with more PPE gear, but we have sufficient because our health system is not overloaded, because our government listened to good advice.
Let’s pick NY as comparison: confirmed “132,467 cases, including 9,101 confirmed coronavirus deaths and 4,582 probable coronavirus deaths“. Assuming death rate 0.5% after 3 weeks, then actual cases is in the millions. With that sort of community transmission then strains could make a difference. NY state has approx 4x the population of NZ, and 1000x more deaths.
NZ has a few thousand cases, NY has a few million cases. NZ acted fast and hard as soon as community transmission was detected. That explains the difference in deaths, and you can’t jump to any conclusions about death rates because the relevant numbers are too imprecise.
Either way, I expect NZ will sequence the different clusters, so in time we will know
And NZ tourism is mostly during our summer, so Jan/Feb/Mar are busy. “Tourism is New Zealand's biggest export industry, contributing 20.4% of total exports.“
> warm island nation
Irrelevant: compare NZ to states with equivalent temperature and population in say February and then compare your death rates.
Yeah - people have to remember that they've grown up with maps where the northern hemisphere is twice the size of the southern. In reality NZ is roughly as long as the west coast of the US and covers roughly the same latitudes (and range of climates, though they're not as continental).
We have been very lucky that the govt put incoming people into voluntary lockdown quite early, China first, then everywhere - that means that lots of cases occurred in isolation and didn't spread (seems like we've received probably more cases from the US than elsewhere), of course some people were stupid, we kicked out some tourists who wouldn't do it.
5 new cases yesterday nationwide, and a continuing lowering trend. Still ~400 people with active cases so we have to be careful - we're nominally getting out of "level 4" lockdown next week, our "level 3" is roughly where California is now, that's predicted to last 2 more weeks - then apart from international travel, and at risk people still taking care we will largely be back to normal. Of course one mistake could scupper all of this.
In both Australia and New Zealand, the number of visitors from overseas is a red herring. The world didn't bring the novel coronavirus to us: we went there and brought it back.
For example, under the old normal, on the order of 1 out of 1000 people in Britain were Australians! I don't know exactly how New Zealand compares, but they wouldn't be far behind.
I think the differences between, say, Australia, New Zealand, Korea, France, Germany and Singapore are pure dumb luck. The virus spread through mega-churches in France and Korea; they were doing exactly the same things in Rooty Hill, but no one who turned up happened to be infected. New Zealand bogans haven't discovered cruise ships yet. Melbourne's international student accomodation got lucky, Singapore's guest worker dormitories didn't. And so on.
Don't get me started on Australian federalism. The Commonwealth decided to let the virus in and suppress it, ignoring the fact that the states were committed to blowing a trillion dollars on lockdowns the moment it turned up in volume. At least we can blame federalism; what excuse does New Zealand have?
41 years + 1 day ago, my mother and I returned to the US from New Zealand. Every time I see a story like this, I wonder if that was really such a great idea. Good for them. I'd be pleased and proud to have Jacinda Ardern leading my country.
I lived there for a couple years about a decade ago. I left because the job opportunities for highly-qualified software engineers in NZ was basically zero. The only real option presented for Kiwis was to move to Sydney.
It is very frustrating to hear multinationals opening offices in Sydney and saying "New Zealand people can work there too, it's all the same" when it's not. American companies open Canadian offices all the time because the cultures are different. Australia and New Zealand have the same relationship: same language, different cultures.
It grinds my gears to this day because I would love to return for good, but I can't/won't give up my career, and I don't really want to move to Sydney. I want to move to New Zealand.
I live in Auckland and the tech scene has really been booming in the last year or two. Obviously it's no SF bay area, and there are now companies struggling in the current economic conditions, but it may be worth another look in, say, a year.
Is there still a shortage of qualified tech workers and do you know if they make exceptions for those that don't meet the required amount of points for immigration? I'm short by 5 points because I don't have a degree (but I have well over a decade of experience in software development).
EDIT: N/M looks like I can get in easily if I'm offered a job by an NZ employer listed as an "absolute skill shortage", so I guess I answered my own question. I'm using this tool for anyone curious: https://www.immigration.govt.nz/new-zealand-visas/apply-for-...
I managed to return to New Zealand recently (currently in mandatory quarantine) and it's amazing how different the job market looks after just one year in a bigger city (London).
I see nothing in this article that suggests that New Zealand was particularly scientific in their response in contrast with other countries. This idea comes from someone's viewpoint of NZ's relationship with the scientific community, but that doesn't really demonstrate that their leaders responded in line with whatever scientific evidence there is.
This comes of as yet another "I f*ing love science" type news story.
Not sure they were massively more empathetic either. The reality is that because it's an isolated island whose countrymen aren't regularly jetting back and forth it had relatively few cases in mid March and found it completely practical to quarantine everybody who had been overseas for 14 days at that point. Fiji's doing pretty well apart from the tourist industry too, and I'm not sure their government is also outstandingly scientific or empathetic.
Certainly, some countries have done much more counterproductive things than NZ and some countries would have had better capacity to respond if they listened to epidemiologists more. But for all the UK government has legitimately been criticised for being slow to respond and poor at communicating, it went into lockdown on exactly the same day as NZ. It just likely had at least two or three orders of magnitude more cases at the time.
I strongly suspect that by the time this is done we will have some handle of things that could have reasonably been done differently in different places without the full benefit of hindsight. And some of the policies that were clearly counterproductive.
I also suspect we'll probably find that some things that people have very strong and strident opinions about don't strongly correlate to results across regions. And that the reasons why things were so different between a lot of country or state As and country or state Bs will either be unclear or be the result of factors that couldn't really be mitigated.
I think "correlates" already is the wrong way to look at this as it implies a kind linear model, but we know it's much more complicated than that. You can't look at a single policy in isolation, you have to look at it as part of a strategy. Then there is also flawed implementations of fundamentally sound ideas to take into account.
Oh, I don't disagree. And even if you look at policies, the cultural response to a given policy can significantly affect the overall effectiveness. Things like density matter too. I can leave my house for a walk and not see a person. Hard to do in Manhattan.
There are a few facts missing from your first paragraph.
It might look like an "isolated island whose countrymen aren't regularly jetting back" from the outside, but New Zealand is much more connected than that. Inbound, international students, migrant workers (mainly horticulture) and tourists are huge. Outbound, LAX is only a single flight.
The quarantine was only imposed fairly recently. Until late March IIRC, self-isolation was require because it would have been impossible to quarantine ~100k arrivals for 2 weeks.
Sure, before they extended quarantine to everyone and barred all foreign nationals from entering, people who exhibited no symptoms and could demonstrate a 'viable self-isolation plan' were allowed to voluntarily quarantine themselves instead of being put into government approved facilities. That's still something which is considerably easier to impose in New Zealand after only six known cases of a disease than in Western Europe, where people take day trips or even commute to other countries. Sure, NZ isn't [usually] cut off from the outside world, but it isn't a transit hub, somewhere you expect to visit to conclude a business deal or watch the away leg of a football match or a stop on a busy itinerary either.
For related reasons NZ only had six known cases by mid March when they imposed that restriction. Italy had 21k cases and 1400 deaths at that point, with a few hundred more dying every day from that point onwards.
New Zealand is the only country that has a government that full elimination is a viable option. The modelling that drives the belief is 100% based on the best available science. You can read the papers yourself, they've already been released by the underlying institute: https://www.tepunahamatatini.ac.nz/2020/04/. In particular "Modelling COVID-19 spread and the effects of Alert Level 4 in New Zealand" was highly persuasive https://www.tepunahamatatini.ac.nz/2020/04/09/a-stochastic-m...
It's more expensive for New Zealand to shut its borders than most countries. In a sense, we're least able to eliminate the virus because we're so heavily dependent on our international connectivity.
We rely heavily on immigration. Our policy planners expect the population to grow every year because of new arrivals. That movement has other effects, like supporting house price inflation. Which itself impacts the banks' expectations and willingness to lend. And so on.
Tourism and international education are very significant industries for us. Tourism employs about 1/7 workers. Even something that appears relatively domestic, such as growing food, relies on migrant workers from the Pacific.
> New Zealand is the only country that has a government that full elimination is a viable option. The modelling that drives the belief is 100% based on the best available science.
I don't know about NZs relationship with science (or how to quantify that). But compare them to other countries. The UK ignored the warning for weeks and did nothing until it was in a much worse position than most nations. The US is still struggling.
And more widely, other countries are very anti science at the moment. The UK refuses to follow scientific advice on almost any subject. From Brexit to Badger Culls to fracking to emissions to drug policy, the UK gets excellent advice and does the opposite. The USA similarly has climate deniers running the federal government. Being pro science is very easy by comparison.
I get where you're coming from, there are too many "isn't science great" articles and people agree with them from their own bias, not sense. But be careful, you may be making the opposite mistake. Or maybe you're right? :)
It is softer science but there were many warnings of the problems to come with the approach including London's financial dependence, their current supppy and demand for workers being fulfilled by it and parts of the legal code left undefined by severed dependencies. Soft as the science may be it may be you just can't get a baby in a full month with any number of volunteer fertile not currently pregnant women and volunteer virile men.
Regardless of one's views of the goals or even the geopolitics there were many predictable issues that would need to be addressed before a split that weren't to make the idea look and sound good but make the transition worse.
New Zealand definitely benefited a lot from being a remote island nation but our response also got a lot of things right. For example, being quick to implement travel restrictions and eventually a closed border. The other example that stood out to me was that the country decided to go into its highest level of lockdown when the first cases of community transmission were detected (I believe when it was decided we had 2 cases of community transmission).
So I definitely agree that NZ benefited a lot by being more remote and having no land borders, but we are only doing so well because we didn’t underestimate the virus and took drastic action early.
A surviorship bias at its finest. There are so many aspects of this disease we don't understand, trumpeting various accomplishments on incomplete data helps no one. It is a small, isolated island nation, neither the measures taken nor the expected outcomes of same measures are representative for larger societies.
If anything Germany is far better case on how to manage an outbreak than New Zealand.
Sure, but the border was sealed after 100s of thousands of tourists, and hundreds of infected cases arriving from overseas. This was before we had any ability to test for the virus. Returning NZers were asked to self-quarantine for two weeks, and I’m guessing the majority did.
Second female leader to have a baby while in office!
All that in less than 3 years being elected at a young age. Just wow!
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