New Zealand relied on science and empathy

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52344299

by colinprince • 6 years ago

79 89 6 years ago

coder1001• 6 years ago

Amazing Prime Minister leading the country through the 15th of March terrorist attack, the aftermath, and then this Covid-19 crises!

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!

cgh2• 6 years ago

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.

oh_sigh• 6 years ago

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.

ska2• 6 years ago

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.

Barrin92• 6 years ago

Part that stood out for me

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.

kolikotime2• 6 years ago

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.

abrowne2• 6 years ago

warm

"Temperate" I'd agree on, but not "warm".

kolikotime2• 6 years ago

For the past month temps have virtually been in the 60s/70s as it’s their summer/early fall. By Global north standards that’s warm.

AnotherGoodName• 6 years ago

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.

notacoward2• 6 years ago

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.

kaesar14• 6 years ago

But Iceland is a part of the Schengen Zone and is open to free travel with Europe, I don't see how New Zealand is NOT more isolated than Iceland

usaar333• 6 years ago

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?

dzhiurgis2• 6 years ago

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!

braythwayt2• 6 years ago

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.

jgon• 6 years ago

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.

rriepe2• 6 years ago

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.

rhino3692• 6 years ago

Warmth is still an open question, but generally coronaviruses spread much slower in warm weather.

Chinese immigrants visiting family for Chinese new year were a large source of initial infections in America, Canada, and Italy.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

Interesting. Lets run a quick comparison between Louisiana and New Zealand.

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)

Aaronstotle• 6 years ago

Louisiana also had Mardi Gras, which brought in tons of people from around the country to New Orleans, likely spreading Covid

rriepe2• 6 years ago

Cool, can you compare hemispheres next?

lordgrenville2• 6 years ago

So Louisiana is more densely populated, and much less isolated. Not sure what point you're making.

scottLobster• 6 years ago

Pretty disingenuous comparison. You leave out:

Exposure to cross-border travel:

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.

ashtonkem3• 6 years ago

Doesn’t NZ depend heavily on tourism to run its economy?

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

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.

onetimeusename• 6 years ago

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.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/st.int.arvl?view=map

AbrahamParangi• 6 years ago

New Zealand is warm?

karmelapple• 6 years ago

Yeah, I don’t understand that comment.

New Zealand is amazing. But it also has large mountains with snow. It’s not exactly warm though.

goatforce53• 6 years ago

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.

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obj...

robocat6• 6 years ago

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.

robocat6• 6 years ago

with far less international travel to it than literally the rest of the Western World

Did you make that up? From 2018 data https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/st.int.arvl?view=map

Tourists to NZ: 3.7M population: 4.9M

Tourists to US: 80M population: 327M

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.

About 1/3 of NZ cases are NZers returning from overseas, which makes NZ numbers even better: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/19/1101216/covid-19-in-nz...

Taniwha2• 6 years ago

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.

iateanapple• 6 years ago

You are only looking at tourism - now add in business and personal travel.

For example JFK international airport alone gets around 30 million international passengers a year.

thisrod• 6 years ago

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?

notacoward2• 6 years ago

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.

cflewis2• 6 years ago

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.

edsrzf• 6 years ago

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.

shaoonb• 6 years ago

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).

ravenstine• 6 years ago

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.

notahacker2• 6 years ago

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.

ghaff3• 6 years ago

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.

timClicks3• 6 years ago

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.

timClicks3• 6 years ago

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...

morelisp• 6 years ago

New Zealand is the only country that has a government that [thinks] full elimination is a viable option.

Are you sure this isn't because NZ is one of very few countries where full elimination is a viable option?

javagram• 6 years ago

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.

Isn’t Taiwan also on this path?

discreteevent• 6 years ago

Ireland's approach and results seem to be nearly identical.

procinct• 6 years ago

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.

glofish• 6 years ago

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.

Mikeb852• 6 years ago

The fact it's an isolated island with a small population and it's their summer no doubt helps too...

drocer88• 6 years ago

Most of the countries that ran balanced budgets performed well : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

robocat6• 6 years ago

“Tourism is New Zealand's largest export industry in terms of foreign exchange earnings. It directly employs one in eight New Zealanders.“

NZ is highly connected, and it gets a significant number of tourists from China. Summer is the high season for tourism.

So if anything, NZ should be hit harder than many less connected states/countries.

Mikeb852• 6 years ago

Still easier to seal the border when you're an island.

And summer matters because most scientists think hot weather slows the virus' ability to spread.

nisse72• 6 years ago

Actually it's been autumn here for 2 months.

bioinformatics• 6 years ago

Did they rely on geography too?

jessaustin• 6 years ago

Small nations are easier to govern in reasonable and just fashion than large nations. Therefore, nations should be small rather than large.

New Zealand relied on science and empathy

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