This potentially controversial, but I think that it’s actually possible that some countries shut down too early, as much as people want to blame our’s and other governments for not shutting down early enough.
I said this fairly early on, not shutting down as early does mean that some people will have been exposed to COVID and may even have had it a-symptomatically without knowing and developed some immunity. IF you cut that off before it has even spread a little bit, then you run the risk that when you re-open, you have an entire population who haven’t been exposed at all and who are all still as vulnerable as they were before the initial shutdown.
I had wondered whether the countries who shut down so quickly and who were praised for it were being a bit too confident about saying that they had eradicated the virus when other countries were still in the stages of fighting it.
It was inevitable that some people would have gone back into those countries and taken COVID with them, and with an entirely untouched population this would spread.
I think that our shutting down later might actually end up being to our benefit in the long run. And before anyone jumps on me and suggests I think that the number of deaths is a good thing, of course it isn’t. But while shutting down early might have prevented deaths this time round, if we had done that and then opened up too early the number of deaths could have been far worse.
Hopefully this is just a blip for NZ, but think it’s worth watching this space...