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.
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.
New Zealand is interesting because it's an island (2+, really), mostly rural, relatively isolated from the world, and caught it early. At some point they're going to open up, and someone with a 16-day incubation period will slip by and spread it. Or someone from a container ship.
The first US fatality was reported on Feb 29. There are reports that it started spreading in the US in late December. It took two months to notice it, 3.5 to panic. That said, people are looking for it now, so that helps.
Having had 1504 confirmed and probable cases across the country New Zealand now has no active cases at all. There have been 294,848 tests completed, with testing still being active both in the community and at borders. New Zealand's first case was on February 28th.
Also for anyone looking at NZ/Australia graphs, a large number of the cases are people returning from overseas that are detected (it is estimated there are 1 million NZers overseas, 5 million left). This has the effect of making the exponential growth look slow (unless the community transmission goes out of control, but both countries appear to be preventing uncontrolled CT).
> And after all of that, you all recently had one of the highest rates of infection since the pandemic started.
I think you need to check the stats again, NZ is finding about 20 covid cases per day. They have had fewer than 4,000 cases of covid since March 2020. It’s one of the lowest rates of infection in the world and appear on track to eliminate the delta variant from their country for now. (I suspect it’s only a matter of time till it escapes their quarantine system though, but they’re successfully buying time to finish a vaccination campaign.)
Coronavirus hit New Zealand in 2020, and by May 2nd twenty people had died. New Zealand implemented lockdowns and ordered vaccines, although they took a while to come. By the end of October 2021, 28 people had died of Covid in New Zealand. They had massively attended sporting events at the height of the world pandemic as coronavirus was undetectable in the country. Once pretty much any one who wanted to be vaccinated got vaccinated, they loosened the rules.
Whereas in the US you have immediate resistance from these Christian fundamentalists (Hillsdale is Christian fundamentalist). Over one million Americans are dead of Covid, lots of people have long Covid, and anecdotally hospitals were full and all hospital patients saw delays in care, so I am sure people who could not get cancer treatments died due to these nuts.
I have no doubt New Zealand will get back to 0 cases since they reached 0 from a far higher rate earlier in the year. It's currently ~10 cases per day they are detecting.
They haven't identified the gap in the quarantine that allowed this current outbreak but it looks like an edge case regardless since they stayed at 0 cases for almost 6 months now.
Uhuh. Hawaii, an entire US state that is "a bunch of islands in the middle of nowhere" and yet somehow didn't eliminate the virus has far fewer people than New Zealand.
The disease is close to eradicated inside the borders of NZ. At this point there are only a couple of hundred active cases and we’ve now had a couple of days with 0 new cases. Australia seems to be on track for the same thing.
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