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Comment by knz | Hacker News Reader

> Covid zero is an ideological pipe dream unless NZ wants to permanently ban international travel

The goal of eliminating COVID there is to reduce the burden on the healthcare system during an active global pandemic. Until recently NZ had very low vaccination rates - zero COVID as a policy was closely tied to this and few (none?) of their mitigation measures will be permanent.

I'm a dual US/NZ citizen with family on both sides of the Pacific. It's almost comical how much negativity there is outside of NZ towards their COVID strategy, especially when you consider how minimal the disruption had been until this most recent outbreak.

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> especially when you consider how minimal the disruption had been until this most recent outbreak.

Does your family live in Auckland? The on-again/off-again severe lockdowns there have been brutal to families and businesses alike. Simple business calculations become extremely difficult in that environment even if your employees getting severely ill isn’t one of them. The tourism industry employed ~14% of the national workforce directly or indirectly, when will that sector recover? I would hardly call the disruption minimal.

Yes, many of my family and friends are in Auckland.

I don't mean it hasn't caused any disruption - only that the disruption prior to this outbreak was minimal compared to much of the world over the last 18 months.

Zero Covid makes sense as an objective prior to the recent Delta outbreak. Delta's R0 is too high for zero covid to be a realistic objective. The experiences of other places that have tried to go for elimination and failed is evidence of this. That's why it's an ideological pipe dream and it's why I may sound negative about it. It's a fantasy. New Zealand will never be Covid zero from this point. Even if they get to Covid zero (which they won't), the only way to maintain that is to permanently ban international travel, which would be a move that has no public health justification once high vaccination rates are reached.

Managing covid to reduce the burden on healthcare and buying time for vaccinations is not the same thing as going for an impossible covid zero.

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