Hacker News Reader

Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

> Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working

Is this not why the situation persists? Lockdown hard then go back to pretty-much-normal seems vastly preferable. I say this from NZ. The hit has been hard, but it seems that partial lockdowns and half measures actually lead to worse outcomes. The death toll is certainly on another scale when you don’t lock down.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.rnz.co.nz/article/ba935329-...

View on HN

Half measures seem to have worked here in Madrid during the second wave.

There is a general curfew at midnight and health districts of the metropolitan area have been selectively locked down, but everything else has remained open: restaurants, gyms, non-essential businesses, etc.

Cases per 100k are not low but they have been declining for weeks now, with most of the city largely open for business.

I suppose this depends on how ‘worked’ is defined. If one is after a flattened curve it has worked well. In terms of elimination, it hasn’t got there.

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.

Per capita that's only 2.5 times as many for the UK.

Victoria in Australia managed to pull things back into line from a pretty dire situation too.

At massive economic cost. It has only been bearable due to the other states remaining open and proping up the Victorian economy via Federal Government payments.

Just at the state level debt is expected to more than triple by FY23/24 to $155b.

Ongoing semi-lockdowns, presumably until the majority of the population can be vaccinated, plus the affect of the infection on individuals along with their medical costs and absence from work has a cost too.

It’s been expensive in the UK, too.

https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai...

Situations like this are what money-printing was made for.

Money is just a means to an ends. It acts as a means of exchange, unit of account, and store of value.

What we really want are goods and services to consume. If people aren't going to work and producing goods and providing services then there will be less to go around making us all poorer.

Locking down does have a large economic cost, but the alternative is a large number of preventable deaths. I know which course of action I prefer to be taken.

Lockdowns are expensive when you do them late. The point is to do them as early as possible or better do proper contact tracing, mask usage, travel restrictions early. E.g. Taiwan put on full travel restrictions super fast and now operate like a normal country with minimal economic damage. Dragging your feet on COVID19 is what gets expensive.

700/day in a single state, and now it's officially eliminated statewide (0/day for 28 consecutive days).

Per capita, that's worse than the 5000/day in the UK.

I don't think the NZ strategy was ever viable for Europe and the US. They have very integrated economies that rely on massive amounts of travel and freight movement, at the same time they have very fractured political systems.

NZ relies on an incredible amount of international trade to survive.

It's a tiny island nation that is in no way economically independent from its trading partners.

And yet, they've figured out how to stop both community spread, and travel-related spread.

I mentioned this in a comment above but the U.K. and New Zealand are on Different scales when it comes internationalism. The U.K. ranks 4th worldwide for international travellers per capita, and New Zealand 38th. Looking at the numbers for international trade as a percentage of GDP, NZ quite below the global average, whereas the UK way above it. NZ has the advantage of size and geography too. It’s largest city is 1/10th size of London and it’s overall far, far less densely populated - the UK has pop density of 279/km2 vs 19/km2 for NZ. So while what they have been able to achieve is admirable, if there was one country that should be able to do it, it was New Zealand. Tiny, wealthy and isolated. Expecting other countries to be able to do the same doesn’t make sense.

Have you a source on your travel statistic? I’d been trying to find something like that but the sources have been terrible. In isolation I’m not sure of the relevance of the comparison between NZ and UK regarding travel frequency. New Zealand’s largest economic sector was tourism.

Pretty much every tourist flew in, and tourists are in close proximity to each other for 4+ hours. It doesn’t matter how often New Zealanders fly internationally if tourists come in infected. The UK has international flights that last a 15-20 minutes. This could give you covid for sure, but it may avoid infecting the whole plane.

A total of about 3.8 million tourists arrived in NZ in 2019, a number equivalent to about 75% of NZs population. The UK had about 38 million tourists in 2018 (most recent numbers available) and that equates to about 56% of the UKs population. NZ had a lot of tourists relative to its population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_New_Zealand

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Even now we are getting people fly in with covid every day, usually several cases and this is happening without there being international tourism anymore.

The UK doesn’t even require self isolation in all cases and having tried asking people to self isolate in NZ, we know exactly how it doesn’t work. Managed isolation is hard enough to get right.

https://www.gov.uk/uk-border-control

Overall, what happened in NZ was impossible in the UK due to a lack of will, not anything else. NZ was willing to sacrifice it’s largest industry. How would you describe the approach used in the UK? It doesn’t appear to have a particular focus or goal.

Sure, source: https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/bymap/AirTrafficPasse...

I don’t believe the tourism argument holds up in the slightest either. The UK has the fourth largest number of yearly inbound tourists visitors in the world. New Zealand is 69th. Source: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/ST.INT.ARVL/rank...

The degree to which the UK is connected to the world is just on a different scale to New Zealand. That’s before you even consider the geography, population density, and wealth distribution sides of the argument. It was always going to be more difficult to control it in the UK. I don’t think lack of will is a valid excuse either. What country doesn’t want to get back to normal as quickly as possible? Why is it that only this tiny island in the Pacific has managed to do it? Is every single other country is simply that incompetent? It just doesn’t make sense. There has to be other factors involved.

> The U.K. ranks 4th worldwide for international travellers per capita, and New Zealand 38th.

> Sure, source https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/bymap/AirTrafficPasse...

If you order that list by ‘per capita’ NZ is way above the UK, 13th versus 24th. I think you have misread it and got the absolute number of travellers.

> The degree to which the UK is connected to the world is just on a different scale to New Zealand.

In absolute numbers, yes, per capita, no. With covid the thing that matters is people coming into contact. The ratio tourists/population matters. NZ has a lot of travel and relative to it’s population, a lot more than the UK. And NZs population travel a lot more.

> I don’t believe the tourism argument holds up in the slightest either.

How so? Tourists bring in covid.

If you look at things relative to the population, NZ has a lot of people moving a lot of the time.

NZ may be a small, far away islands (it’s bigger than the UK geographically), but the approach NZ used wasn’t invented here and is not novel. It was copied from others that had success. Interestingly, a lot of good policy came from South Korea. South Korea copied it from the NHS. Others have had good results too, NZ is not alone at any stretch and did not pioneer it’s policies.

I’m sure there are other factors and many of them. However the UK leaders have not done well and have contributed hugely to the problems. The ignoring of advice from experts is incredible - why set up systems if you don’t want them? They continue to ignore the most basic advice and get exactly the outcome one would expect, covid.

You're right, I grabbed the absolute numbers by mistake. I'm not sure it dilutes the point as much as you are suggesting though. Absolute numbers do matter - as the difference is still huge (~10x). It a far harder problem to contain 10,000 infections than 1000 even in a country with resources because of the nature of exponential growth. Things are going to take off faster and more aggressively with a higher seed number, so even with proportionally the same resources, you have less time to react.

I actually never at any point said that I thought the UK was doing things well (I'm not from the UK). My point is that I don't think NZ's success was down especially to brilliant leadership so much as a combination of factors that make it a uniquely hard place for a disease like COVID to enter and spread.

In per capita terms yes, but in absolute terms not so much.

Trade in goods is also mostly via very long sea journeys which off course act as a sort of quarantine period. In terms of air travel Auckland is the only hub airport and the number of transit passengers is quite small.

The UK is an island. Scotland and North Ireland were down to pretty much zero transmission by summer. It would have been feasible for the whole UK.

Continental europe would have faced a harder time coordinating it.

I disagree. The UK’s economy is far more international than New Zealand’s. The U.K. ranks 4th worldwide for international travellers per capita, and New Zealand 38th. Shutting down air travel to the financial centre of the world would have been an incredibly risky move at the time. It may have been the right move in hindsight, but at the time it was far easier for the tiny island on the edge of the world to even consider doing it.

I don’t mean in march necessarily. But the UK never implemented testing at the border or isolation for travellers in any rigorous way.

They could have done this sometime over the summer. Going zero covid has huge economic benefits. And with testing you could let business travellers in with a modified isolation.

It was only worth doing in March. Because there were so few cases NZ got down to zero in about 5 weeks. Once the cases numbers build up the time and economic cost to get to zero is unfeasible.

> The U.K. ranks 4th worldwide for international travellers per capita, and New Zealand 38th.

If the below is the source, you’re citing an absolute, not per capita stat. NZ ranks significantly above the UK for travel per capita, and the UK population do not travel that much.

https://www.citypopulation.de/en/world/bymap/AirTrafficPasse...

The UK is connected to continental Europe via the Channel Tunnel. We rely on an endless stream of trucks coming across from the continent and driving directly to destinations throughout the UK with their original drivers to supply us with important things like food, and they often then go on to do delivery trips within the country. (One of the big reasons that Brexit is supposed to be such a disaster is that it'll disrupt all this. With the scale at which this happens, even a small delay to each truck is apparently enough to cause massive disruption.)

Remember, this is a very good way of spreading Covid-19 to new areas - it's almost certainly how it got into Beijing, which was the best and most aggressively protected city in all of China at the time.

And yet the Chinese managed to control t. More people, higher density and little in the way of warning. It’s one hell of a failure that the UK has had. Squandered preparation time and wasted opportunity with massive economic and health/death toll costs.

London in particular is a massive international travel hub. It’s a part of the EU (for a few more weeks...), not an isolated island.

NZ has nothing that comes close. Australia is about a 4hr flight away.

but being a travel hub does not mean too much: you can still isolate people who enter the border.

People in transit infect each other, and workers are exposed to more chances to get infected, but it's a more manageable situation than land borders.

Physically possible? Sure. Economically and socially possible? I think that's debatable.

Elimination strategy works, and other strategies don't work. This isn't a novel insight, it's how infectious diseases programmes work regardless, Guinea worm: Elimination strategy. Rinderpest: Elimination strategy. Polio: Elimination strategy. Smallpox: Elimination strategy. It was never a question of whether it was "viable" except in the sense of whether political will existed to act. In the US and to a lesser extent Europe, that will did not exist.

The UK absolutely could have chosen to not have tens of thousands of people die for no purpose, but its political leadership were focused, as ever, on what's in it for them. How much can we exploit this to line our own pockets, how many old mates can be rewarded? Sure, people are dying, but isn't this a perfect chance to loot the corpses?

The UK could have started its first lockdown much earlier, and imposed quarantine on all arrivals. Then lifted the lockdown in areas with no spread, while keeping the quarantine. It's not like it was a mystery what was happening, once we'd seen what happened in Wuhan. China had the hardest job, dealing with a newly discovered infection, but has been among the least affected countries.

You believe their numbers....tell me you dont really, please

You can take Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand as alternative examples, if you don't believe that China managed to control it.

Are you aware that "lock down hard" isn't possible? Do you expect food to still turn up in the shops, garbage to be collected, maintenance to be done on your utilities, online purchases to still work?

The death toll is on the scale of normal seasonal flu outbreaks when you subtract the deaths caused by lockdowns (i.e. that occur during lockdowns but that don't mention COVID on the death certificate). New Zealand is screwed by the way: good luck with international travel from now on.

I’m in NZ. Our level 4 lockdown was strict and only essential services kept running.

Can you provide a source showing covid is less deadly that the flu?

I can travel internationally from NZ and can get back in if I want to, but I don’t want to leave NZ. Why are we screwed? Everything is normal here now.

I didn't say it was less deadly than the flu. I said it's comparable to a normal seasonal flu outbreak if you subtract deaths caused by lockdowns. Please don't change people's arguments in the act of re-phrasing them.

Source: look at excess death data for most European countries. Even in the UK which had a significant wave of non-COVID excess deaths during the first wave (a little under half of them didn't mention COVID on the death certificate), excess deaths from it was similar to the winter of 1999/2000. And in countries that have less incompetent management the waves of deaths are similar to flu waves.

There are many, many sources you can get the data from. Try EuroMoMo, the national statistical agencies etc. But here's just one example, long term Swedish mortality data:

https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-...

Remember Sweden didn't lock down. Modelling predicted a bloodbath which never happened.

As for NZ, what kind of business or tourist travellers will go to New Zealand now they have to be temporarily imprisoned at their own absurdly high expense? Adding a more than $3000 charge per person to arrival, plus lost time? Your island is currently a pariah state that people will avoid visiting unless absolutely necessary, indefinitely.

I assume at some point these rules will be dropped for those who can show an immunity passport because it's the only way New Zealand doesn't just drop off the face of the planet, but vaccines aren't 100% effective and even the vaccinated can still carry the virus: they just get milder symptoms. So it's not at all clear how New Zealand plans to ever open back up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com