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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Continental europe would have faced a harder time coordinating it.
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.
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...
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.
NZ has nothing that comes close. Australia is about a 4hr flight away.
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.
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?
Just at the state level debt is expected to more than triple by FY23/24 to $155b.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai...
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.