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.
That certainly helped, but we had infections cross the border and community transmission. We still have people entering the country through a 14 day hotel quarantine so we're still allowing infected people across the border into the country. The island nation part of it isn't the whole story.
Restricting the rate at which it can spread through the community coupled with active and aggressive contact tracing certainly seems like it played a significant role. I'd be looking cockeyed at any study that chooses not to include the Australian and NZ datasets without a very robust case about why it's necessary.
Probably because our (NZ) governments are simpler. The entire New Zealand government is probably more similar to a state legislature than it is to the US govt.
The UK could have also succeeded but the government didn't have the will to even try early on. Now they are only willing to take half measures.
Also, we DID (NZ, AUZ) have a small advantage since we had less inbound infected for a few weeks early on due to distance. But then again, other nations (US, UK, ...) didn't even try to pursue an elimination strategy.
The pacific islands seem to have done rather well in preventing Covid to take hold. Because they basically closed all borders early on. Fiji seems to have gotten quickly rid of covid with the first wave and ever since had no cases. Besides Fiji being said to be an overall nice place to be in, it certainly was pleseant as there were no restrictions for those on the island.
There's also no western nation that tried NZ/Aus's "go early, go hard" policy of lockdowns and didn't reach 0 local cases.
Maybe the real difference is that we're an island. But much more likely is our different public policies. And if you need evidence, the UK is an island (like Aus/NZ) with policies more like the US and - surprise! They have case numbers more similar to the US than similar to Aus/NZ.
If you really think the island / continent thing is relevant, I'm excited to hear the story of why the US's covid disaster is somehow actually canada and mexico's fault.
Underrated comment. NZ, AUS, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea. Most of the countries doing well have dealt with bird flu, SARS, etc in the recent past. Shouldn't surprise people they reacted quickly and got it under control. They had plenty of practice.
New Zealand did both, and both worked - it did delay the inevitable, but that allowed time for the population to become vaccinated, for supplies of PPE to build up, for hospitals to build ICUs etc, and provide time for the virus to change to the much-less deadly omicron (delta and alpha never spread widely in NZ - we avoided all of that). Per head of population, our death rate was lower than almost any other country in the world. And we enjoyed an entire year of normal life between the successful elimination of alpha/delta and the eventual emergence of omicron while the rest of the world suffered.
All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice, and you'd be hard pressed to find a significant number of New Zealander's that think now that the better strategy would have been to 'let her rip'. Of course you can find personal examples where lockdowns/border closures were a worse outcome for some people (I have a friend whose brother was unable to see his dying father), but being able to quote examples like that doesn't refute the strategy, because we only have to look to other countries to see what the alternatives were - a much, much, higher death rate.
You say "the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe", but you don't say what that country was - did it have a lower death rate than NZ did?
UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita.
Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
Yeah, as a Kiwi it's a bit annoying to have the local media only compare us to Sweden and places that have had a terrible time with the virus. I'd like to see us compared more with the places you mentioned, as well as Taiwan. If you want to have the best response to the virus you need to look to the other success stories.
New Zealand and Vietnam definitely half-assed some rather important parts of their response. For example, New Zealand's prime minister told everyone for two months that workers in their quarantine hotels were being tested weekly for Covid. She came under some criticism for the lack of testing of other potentially-exposed workers, like at ports, but insisted that at least the important ones were being monitored. Most of those workers had, in fact, never been tested. At least one of them was definitely infected, and this was only detected because an unrelated outbreak of unknown source finally prompted the government to test them all - it very nearly caused their attempt to keep out Covid to fail, if something else hadn't first.
As for Vietnam, if I remember rightly their run of no Covid cases was ended by a hospital outbreak that somehow went unnoticed until an elderly visitor to the hospital with no other plausible sources of infection happened to get infected, develop bad symptoms, and tested positive - and then so did several other people who'd been there. This does not suggest good things about their in-hospital testing. The amount of time it took for the existence of a new case to become public knowledge should also call into question just how forthright and honest the government was being.
NZ peaked at 150 cases/day, the UK didn’t start its first lockdown till 5000 cases/day. And that’s 5000 tested cases.
It was too late (even though Italy was bad and a good canary, UK politicians did nothing). Even if the country remains in permanent lockdown the virus will still spread now for months/years.
We should have slammed the international borders shut at the first sign of it, and placed any region with outbreaks into the strictest lockdown we could humanely devise. Lesson learned for next time. Too late for that for most of the world. Now we have to learn to live with it somehow.
But it worked for New Zealand. They're in a very odd position now. Domestically as long as they can keep it out, they could go completely back to normal. Except for international travel. (It's been mostly normal most of the time aside from that, from what I understand.)
Look at the population and population distributions of GB, NZ, and AUS. It becomes pretty clear that the uk stands apart from the other two in these respects, and it is common sense that this makes it more susceptible.
Regardless of how badly we're handling it, our risk was vastly different to the others.
Islands and countries such as Australia are having a completely different experience, as they can track incoming cases and with good quarantine practices genuinely create a safe bubble for all residents. Watch what happens with New Zealand, Iceland and other small islands like yours and the Canaries etc - you'll be out of lockdown while everyone agrees to be very strict on what enters the country, something continental countries can't do.
My point is that not all countries did bad. Many countries did poorly, but many others responded well to the crisis and have either kept cases down, had very few deaths, or managed to suppress their outbreaks.
> China locking down 11m people didn’t ring any alarm bells in the west.
Yes it did. Australia and NZ started preparing very early for this outbreak. The results are very evident. The US and the UK responded terribly, and their people should be very angry.
Domestic policies probably don't really do that much aside from maybe closing public services like schools.
It has to do with how people behave, as we see in the article here, and NZ gets much less international traffic than the US and the island take has some merit. Iceland had 10 cases, Madagaskar around 150. You could argue that South Korea is an island too since there probably is little exchange on land routes. Australia wishes to be a continent, but... okay, maybe it really doesn't really fit here.
Infections aren't spread homogeneously, so I believe behavior of people is the main factor. Too bad, because you cannot just blame all this on someone.
I think the causes of infections get misattributed just like the performance of economies to immediate government policies.
Well, being an island a 'bit far away' certainly helped.
In Portugal I know folks that drove from London, Paris, Utrecht (Netherlands) and even Moscow to avoid the no fly laws so they could vacation here. I personally know 3 families that drove from Moscow to the Portuguese south during the lockdown period. (And I am sure based on the foreign plates I saw, various orders of magnitude more did so as well).
This is not to say it was all the foreigners, but it is much easier to control a pandemic if you can close all the borders (Madagascar anyone?) and have a smaller population. (This is also not to say NZers shouldn't be praised, but just a land border with 2-3 countries would probably see a lot of these efforts go to waste)
I live in Japan and the response by the government here was and is in sharp contrast to that in the UK (a super soft lockdown that ended before the summer is one example), yet it has been akin to comedy show from the beginning, before it hit the UK.
Still, there has not been the same hit from the disease, which only underlines that the differences in effect that are seen worldwide are about differences in population and geography - being overweight, having a very low friction of movement (e.g. excellent transport links, many borders), and not being low in vitamin D etc - far more than they are about government response.
I'm not saying the UK government has done well but it's striking to me that, from a distance, the criticisms of the UK and US I see coming from my friends are very similar, very parochial, and seem driven by media headlines rather than anything objectively sound.
In short, I'd give it another few years before you judge them more harshly than the government that brought us the Iraq war, for one.
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.
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