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Comment by monkeynotes | Hacker News Reader

My household has had zero cases per capita. Population count and relative isolation make a huge difference.

You can't directly compare NZ with places like Germany or the US.

It's not just that... NZ is an island, with few people going in and out daily. In europe, you have people living in one country and working in another, and driving across the border daily. You have trucks driving through 10 different countries, with drivers stopping, filling up the gas, eating and sleeping in many of them. You have large cities, where the border goes across the urban areas, and your nearest store is in another country.

When we talk about population count, maybe China is a country worth mentioning here?

The success in New Zealand seems like the elephant in the room, that the Atlantic article failed to refer to. Not to mention China.

NZ has no cities. Auckland, the country's largest town, consists of 4 or 5 blocks of high density "city". Wellington another 2 or 3 blocks of high density "city". Outside of those few blocks the entire country is low-rise detached apartments, quickly giving way to semi-detached housing, which quickly gives way to endless suburbia. NZ has zero density.

A lot of paranormal activity for Wellington given that density

Does anyone really believe the reported stats for China?

I'm not saying that Wuhan's number is 100% accurate, feel free to inflate it by 10 times. But even with the censored social media in China, words do get across, and there's no evidence of any big outbreaks like in Wuhan or New York after April last year.

Virus cannot teleport from person to person, so why wouldn't NPIs like real lockdowns with full food delivery and mass testing (unlike mockdowns in some other countries) work?

If you don't believe the numbers, ask anyone you know who has relatives in China.

Lockdowns, or mass hospitalizations/deaths from Covid are a bit difficult to hide from the people living through it, if either of those two things are happening, everyone would hear about it through the grapevine.

I did exactly that (wife’s family lives in Beijing).

Various parts of Beijing and Nanjing have been under relative “lockdown” at various points in time in the last year. I’m pretty sure this has been reported in Western media too (and I’m sure that other parts of the country have too). I have no idea where this idea that “China has zero COVID lockdowns” came from. I suppose it may depend on your definition of lockdown.

I don't doubt that lockdowns are happening, which is why I listed the presence or absence of them as one of the two obvious things that can be observed by people living there.

I do have doubts that their actual case numbers are too far off from reported case numbers. (Because mass sickness and death, just like lockdowns, would also be obvious to observe.)

Of course you can. They just did compare them.

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