To be shocked at how normal everything looks in New Zealand?

[GoldenLabbie]

Huge crowds seeing the New Year. No masks, no social distancing. You wouldn’t know that the rest of the world is in the grip of a pandemic looking at those scenes. How did we manage to get it so wrong but they got it so right? When you look at that you realise how the rest have screwed up so badly don’t you? I wonder what they make of all?

No. Totally incomparable countries.

[quote MaskingForIt]@sashagabadon
Nz are not really going to have enough of their population vaccinated until the autumn maybe Winter 2021 so are going to have their borders closed for some time or risk the virus getting in.

Autumn 2021 begins in a month or so, so they aren’t really that far behind the U.K. as our vaccination programme is only just getting underway. They have a lot few people to vaccinate too.[/quote]
I mean our autumn 2021. So September, October time. And then a slow roll out and then at what point will it be safe to open the borders? I think this could be a difficult decision especially if they mostly use the Oxford vaccine with a lower efficacy. Not a decision I would like to make!!

Population density - surely not difficult to understand utterly incomparable.

@sashagabadon

We are getting part 2, the vaccine bit right though or as right as it is possible to get It under the circumstances. Nz are not really going to have enough of their population vaccinated until the autumn maybe Winter 2021 so are going to have their borders closed for some time or risk the virus getting in. Likely most of the people there are ok with this. It probably is sustainable for another 12 months or so. They also haven’t played any role in solving the problem. U.K. / US and Europe can be rightly proud of their contributions in treatments and of course the vaccines that will hopefully help everyone including New Zealand. But I am happy for them and pleased somewhere in the world is celebrating new year.

My dad lives in NZ, he said they have 4.5m vaccines on order for pop 5m. So they should be golden.

Not just on here, the amount of people I know in real life who think they are entitled to a foreign break. So screw the pandemic, we’ll do what we like. If you wanted a holiday that badly you could have stayed in the U.K!

What has it done to contribute to the world effort?

This is the sort of blind stubborn arrogance that sees us in the situation we're currently in.

How did we manage to get it so wrong but they got it so right?

They are 2,500 miles from their nearest major neighbour.

Yes nZ have ordered vaccines from others but they only get a small amount of pzfizer in the spring and then the Oxford one in the third quarter I think so September/ Oct time 2021. They also have ordered the Jansen one and get that 3rd quarter too so it’ll be a while yet before they can safely reopen their borders I think

I'm in Thailand. 60m+ population, first case of covid outside China, daily flights to Bangkok from Wuhan all through January.
Until very recently, there had been practically no cases of local transmission since March. Now there are some clusters, mainly originating from illegal border entires from Myanmar. Thailand is no New Zealand and social distancing is challenging in a poorer country. What they did is they shut their borders hard. No entry without 2 weeks state quarantine and 3 covid tests for citizens and foreigners. Also anyone positive is isolated in hospital, not at home so they can't infect others.
The tourism industry has been destroyed but at least the country has been open inside for months now.

Going on holiday isn't the problem.

Coming back from a holiday and not quarantining as required, is.

Having absolutely no control at the borders, no temperature checks, no testing facilities for returning travellers, and no system to monitor who is actually complying with the 14 day isolation, is another problem.

Coming back from Ibiza with Covid doesn't necessarily mean you have to spread it.

Completely
Stupid
Comparison.

They have 15% of our population in a land mass 15% bigger, and are hours away from their neighbours. My family lives there, I’m proud of their response but to say we could have done the same is ludicrous.

@KrisAkabusi

They had a proper lockdown and shut the borders. Strict rules that the UK decided would be unacceptable.

Rules that would be impossible in the UK.

@EileenGC

Going on holiday isn't the problem.

Coming back from a holiday and not quarantining as required, is.

Having absolutely no control at the borders, no temperature checks, no testing facilities for returning travellers, and no system to monitor who is actually complying with the 14 day isolation, is another problem.

Coming back from Ibiza with Covid doesn't necessarily mean you have to spread it.

But if people didn’t travel abroad for non essential reasons then you’d have no need to do any of that in the first place. People shouldn’t have even been going to Ibiza etc!

Because we voted in an incompetent party to be the government, mainly because the other main party was/is also incompetent.

Massive cuts everywhere also didn't help, but its ok cause we are strong and stable, Brexit is done and we love a good slogan.

Hindsight is wonderful.

We could have shut our borders, but for how long? We need freight for supplies for so many people.

If we had have eliminated cv, we’d be sat waiting for someone else to find a vaccine as it’s all but impossible to test effectiveness if you can’t be exposed to the virus. So borders would be shut until we had enough vaccines from the Us or elsewhere to roll out a full vaccination program.

Controlling the spread was the better option than closing borders and waiting for a vaccine at the time.

I just think we should have had put everyone in high tiers after the first lockdown. That the variant has arisen in london where the tiers were low despite infection rate is no coincidence...

You can't compare a country with such a small population.

One of the problems with shutting flights is that we don't have have anyone willing to accept the tough things that are needed for that to happen.

Look sf China, New Zealand, Taiwan for example, you know if you go over there and break the law yournin for tough consequences they don't piss about.

We don't have that, we are seen as too soft.

As a country as cannt ourselves even follow some simple rules like on here there is a thread where someone's daughter wants to go to a new yrs eve garden party with 5 other friends going ina tier 4 area. I mean ffs, if your adult child cannot even follow a rule and won't listen to you what fecking hope does the government have.

Everyone quicknto blame the government, yet plenty of parents enabling their children to break the rules or in general adults breaking them themselves.

Ita a joke.

@GoldenLabbie what is essential about a UK holiday then? Is going to the local pub also essential? Taking a day trip to the zoo or going to a UK beach? It was all allowed and encouraged in the summer.

Travel was (is) also completely legal, safe (except for all those going to Spain or Italy who refused to wear masks on the street because "we don't have to in England" and actually caused more mayhem themselves), many people chose to go abroad. But they thought the rules didn't apply to them because of XYZ reason, came back and put everyone they socialised with at risk when they didn't keep to their own bloody houses. If you can commit to 14 days inside your house after a holiday, crack on. The problem was, people decided to pick and choose which bits of a foreign holiday they would do.

Not sure why people are linking borders remaining open with a “non-compliant” population. Surely it’s the government who would make and enforce the decision to close borders?

They have a sensible intelligent person as PM who listened to her scientific advisors and acted accordingly. We have Boris fucking Johnson and his cabinet of arselickers.

I don't think it's a stupid comparison. Auckland, for example, is very built up and densely populated and they still managed to get the instances of community transmission under control there. And I don't think it's wrong to expect more from our government.

The newspapers there report on confirmed new cases (in isolation) with concern. We barely even bat an eyelid at the daily death rate anymore.

I'm so baffled by the number of people who stand ready to defend and make excuses for a group of people who have shown how little they value our lives.

“ How did we manage to get it so wrong but they got it so right? When you look at that you realise how the rest have screwed up so badly don’t you?”

Very hard to compare NZ to U.K. They had extremely strict import rules long before COVID-19 and shut down immediately.

Same here in Ghana, the borders were shut entirely from March to September at which point when they opened back up you needed a Covid test 72 hours before travel and a second test on arrival at the airport here. There are still protocols in place around mask wearing and very few exemptions but otherwise, it's as if Covid is gone. Parties, weddings etc are back.

Their economy has gone to shut and they can't leave the country, we can't visit family there and can't see them opening the borders anytime soon.

@GoldenLabbie

I agree with other posters that we cannot compare the UK to NZ. It's near enough 2500 miles from the nearest country, (not 20 miles like us,) it's slightly bigger than the UK, and has less than 5 million people. It's hardly surprising Covid has pretty much ceased there.

That said, we should have dealt with it better, and should have shut the borders and cancelled all flights in and out, in early March last year, and should not have allowed anyone in or out of the UK at ALL...

Too many people complained about how it was against peoples 'hooman rites' to do that though, and so we are where we are now; in a worse position than we were in March/April, with 1000 deaths for Covid 19 just yesterday alone, all shoved into high tiers, unable to do hardly anything, and the economy hanging by a thread...

Problem is, our Government has dealt with it badly, and British people are largely pretty selfish, and entitled.

I have to say I agree with the posters who have been saying they wish Jacinda Ardern was OUR prime minister!

There is a light at the end of the tunnel though, with the vaccine we now have, but the tunnel is very LONG! We are not out of the woods yet. (Or should that be tunnel...???)