I think it's too early to assess New Zealand vs. Louisiana. New Zealand likely has very little immunity to this virus. And it will have paid a heavy price in second-order effects from lockdowns.
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
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.
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.
NZ has has 1/8900 of the US death toll. We have 1/66th the US population.
It’s hard to argue that our response is going to cause more deaths than the US response. It almost feels like cheating to compare NZ to USA where covid is concerned.
(I'm Australian, and very much pro-NZ except for when a cricket match is being played).
NZ has 7.3% of UK's population.
Auckland has about 1/4 the population density of London's.
NZ's airports have have approx 7% the number of annual passenger movements as UK, and that's before you count the significant numbers of travellers who enter the UK by road or rail.
When the virus started to spread internationally, NZ and Australia were in summer and early autumn, whereas London in recent months has had the same cool winter/early spring conditions that Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Korea and northern US have had when their outbreaks were most severe.
I agree NZ and Australia have done well to contain our outbreaks.
But we've been aided by infinitely more favourable conditions than the UK and US.
I agree. NZ isn't very well traveled compared to the U.S. or most of western Europe. And NZ's population is like 1/20th of Los Angeles County. It's not surprising that the little island handled the virus so well--it'd be more surprising if they didn't.
Yes! New Zealand published current covid locations of interest (where infected people had been) to a github repo - I created an animation of locations over time by crawling the repo history. It gave an idea for how it was spreading through the country, and Auckland in particular.
Yes, many of my family and friends are in Auckland.
I don't mean it hasn't caused any disruption - only that the disruption prior to this outbreak was minimal compared to much of the world over the last 18 months.
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.
So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards.
At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven't recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.
Temperature today: Auckland peaks at 19 C, New Orleans at 25 C
Population: NZ 4.8 million, Lousiana 4.7 million
Density: NZ 18 / sq. km, Lousiana 34 / sq. km
COVID cases (deaths): NZ 1445 (13) , Lousiana 24523 (1328)
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