And a very big island just next door, not quite as authoritative but doing almost as well in the pandemic, Australia, has just opened its doors to New Zealanders. I think we are doing quite well down under thanks to good government and a community that seems to think other lives are as important as our own.
NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.
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.
I'm a kiwi and i've never understood why the world keeps announcing NZ as victorious when covid is a marathon. Ask whether we were successful in 5 years time.
It could become problematic if other countries like Australia start opening up and we see an exodus of young professionals including healthcare workers, the latter we're seeing severe shortages of even with no covid cases. In contrast to NZ, Australia is better resourced to live with Covid and their citizens are quite rebellious against lock-downs, so it wouldn't surprise me if they open up well before NZ which could make things very awkward if we're still fumbling around with an elimination strategy.
This is mostly interesting because NZ has explicitly pursued a strategy of COVID elimination, while Australia has followed a suppression strategy. While recently the effects have been broadly similar (small outbreaks generally quickly contained and stamped out using short regional lockdowns and contact tracing), it's fair to say that a lot of people here in NZ are uncomfortable with this.
That said, this isn't just trying to get some tourist dollars into NZ. Given the large migration between the two countries there are lots of families which are split across the two who will now be able to visit their relatives - they'll be pretty happy to see this news.
Indeed, I'd firstly people in NZ seem to be waaay more reasonable and understanding. Sure there were few brave ones, but everyone generally stuck to the rules and understood what public health means.
Being an island somewhat helps, but it's not like other countries don't have borders that they can protect.
Bureaucracy is pretty low in NZ so we've been able to throw together solutions of screening, etc within matter of a week. Impacted workers got wage subsidy within like 5 days of lockdown started. Heck even Apple took something like 10x longer to release their contact tracing API...
My understanding of the situation in new zealand is that at the beginning of the pandemic (back in march) they knew their health systems weren't up to the job - NZ's health system is kind of bad - so they took decisive action to ensure they could keep the pandemic under control. I think they're a bit better now but they still lack confidence in their health system.
Here, nearby in NSW our public health system is really good. We're currently dealing with out third significant outbreak - seems to be an escape from an overseas arrival - but we can justifiably be confident that we are able to stamp these things out without too much disruption (relatively speaking).
(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.
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