That New Zealand's strategy has failed

[JudesBiggestFan]

And they will have to start the long and painful process of learning to live with Covid? I spoke to my friend in NZ earlier and he was in shock at being back in lockdown. He said they really felt they'd defeated the virus and this has just come out of nowhere. I feel for him but an airborne virus...it can't be stopped. And the cost of trying is too high. Or do they still have a chance of beating the virus?

Step up you do seem very fixated on this.

I think anyone who wants to be vaccinated will be by the end of the year.

Had it not been for this outbreak we would have purified elimination until then but that’s probably a pipe dream now

Once the vax roll out is happened and we have 75-80% fully vaxxed plus a booster programme in place we will start to cautiously open borders, initially for NZers travelling to countries deemed safer - suspect US,UK, some countries in Europe, Singapore, with pre departure testing, shorter MIQ stays maybe home isolation. Hopefully 1st quarter 2022

Higher risk countries will continue to be blocked from entering snd/or 14 days’ MIQ

Covid will circulate at hopefully low levels and between infection immunity and vaccination will hopefully become less of a threat. Modelling suggests with these measures in place we will need to accept circa 500 deaths a year like we do with the flu.

Does that help? We are not totally naive you know

Pursued elimination! Not purified it

@stepupandbecounted

Most people I know are stoic but Increasingly fucked off, & crossing fingers the vaccination programme will help build a pathway out

But the vaccine has not provided the UK with a way out, or any other country in the world. So why would it provide one for NZ? Every single adult that wants a vaccine in the UK, and there is a high take up - has been double vaccinated and we are still living with 32,000-38,000 infections PER day. In reality it is mostly fine, as they are young and recover without an issue.

You can still catch up covid with the vaccine.

So I am wondering what your pathway actually looks like?

I am genuinely interested in how you feel it will work in reality, with the elimination strategy.

It is now known that covid will still spread with or without a vaccine
The power of the vaccine only lasts for six months

But the vaccine has not provided the UK with a way out, or any other country in the world. So why would it provide one for NZ?

It provides a pathway to living with the endemic virus. We hope.

If NZ do manage to suppress this outbreak and then get their population vaccinated at pace, they will be in a similar position. Likely somewhat worse off as there will be no natural immunity whatsoever, and we don’t know how much of a disadvantage that would be, but on the other hand they won’t have gone through the carnage we have. Unfortunately it looks increasingly unlikely that this outbreak can be suppressed and the talk of even stricter controls is concerning.

I studied sociology and politics gennz and this thread is really interesting to read. The level of denial and blind optimism (not all posts of course, but the general consensus) It is quite staggering, given the science and the latest data coming out.

You are clearly accepting in your latest post that the elimination and the zero targets will have to go -

Covid will circulate at hopefully low levels and between infection immunity and vaccination will hopefully become less of a threat

With the exception of one or two other posts you are the only one to do so, apart from the British/American posts trying to point out Delta is totally different to the Alpha strain. The thread is littered with false hope based on old vaccine promises.

The reason I have become so repetitive and exasperated is for this reason. The current strategy the NZ gov are still selling is a zero covid strategy - not some covid or living with covid but zero covid. And you are now under all of these lockdowns to try and achieve that aim, no matter how misguided. Are you expected to live like this until you get to a certain vaccination point??
80% is a very long way off from your current situation gennz The lockdown alone won't get you to zero, even with 100% vaccinated it won't get you to zero.

It just seems entirely dishonest and disingenuous, as the NZ government scientists must know by now that it just isn't possible. They now need to be open about this, and come up with a new plan. People will be right to feel misled and betrayed.

Weirdly some people think I am doom and gloom or have deflected grief rather than face the truth of the situation.

Pinktonic is spot on. And by the way we (UK) have not exactly mastered the virus, far from it, so it is not about competition, and no one wins any medals. It is a process of psychological acceptance in my view.

Unfortunately it looks increasingly unlikely that this outbreak can be suppressed and the talk of even stricter controls is concerning

The view from Ardern seems to be the harder she slams down the lockdown the more likely she will conquer the spread, without fully taking into account that Delta is not the same as Alpha, and the lockdown outcome will be very different and nowhere near as effective.

Would be interesting to hear the Kiwi mumsnetters views on the offensive statement

"We waited, we let you lot be guinea pigs and now we know it's safe. If anything the delay has made people more likely to get the vaccine.

An abject lack of addressing this post but happy to chat about the weather ( So British!)

As to our level of social responsibility as a nation - am not sure we rank that highly. Having lived in 6 countries - 3 of which take social responsibility to a level, I have not seen in either the UK, NZ or Oz. We have a healthcare system which has scoring systems for access to investigations and treatments, waiting lists in normal times that other countries are only now approaching post pandemic, social housing is poor and poor distribution of wealth around the country - not the worst but not perfect either.

So on the one hand you have New Zealand with a handful of cases locking down and at the other end of the world you have the annual binge drinking spree of 16-18 year olds to Newquay not only allowed to go ahead (I didn’t let my DC go a decade ago just because of the tales of sexual assault and drink related deaths ) but a festival laid on to up the numbers to 50000 . Our distant suburb’s daily cases doubled to over 150 in the days after those largely unvaccinated young people returned, way higher than the whole of New Zealand, and some of them are still ill. Cornwall is left with the highest case rate in the country. All the result of the decisions of right wing Libertarian local councillors. Several more festivals coming up in the next week or so. Young people don’t even have to take a lateral flow test, just fill in a form to say they have.

Clearly there have been failures in the zero Covid strategies employed by countries like Taiwan and New Zealand BUT they have still had more freedom and their economies have struggled less than here. And they haven’t thrown their young people in the way of a nasty virus on a massive scale that could leave them with long term health problems.

Yesterday I was in a crowded tube carriage at peak rush with many children out for the day and I was the only person who had a mask on in spite of it being mandatory, one of the Mums was swinging hers gaily on her wrist.

I think perhaps there is something to be said for being a team looking out for each other in the face of Covid as opposed to everyone for themselves.

emily it seems to me that you have not grasped the reason why so many festivals are going ahead in the UK, it was quite deliberate decision I assure you, so that covid infects as many people as possible in the summer months, all are young and healthy. As most of the adult population are now vaccinated. The idea is to take the strain off the NHS in the winter months.

We are not pursuing zero covid Emily, we are now living with endemic virus.

So patronising step. Poor ignorant Emily ! And all those young and healthy who become infected can pass it on to the not so young and healthy. Double jabbed or not.

And all the young and not so healthy - underlying health issues are not uncommon in young people.

We are also still dying with the endemic virus. . .

I see reporting around a "stricter" level 4. In all seriousness, what would level 5 look like as level 4 is already fairly hard? Would it be European style "confined to apartments" with zero exercise, zero time outside, and only once a week to the supermarket with an attestation?

Still, apparently spread is now amongst essential workers, so I'm not sure what the answer is there.

step up I have entirely grasped the reason those festivals are going ahead. Infect those young people before they go back to school and university so you reduce the size of the inevitable surge (playing out already in Scotland) and shift the inevitable blame to the young themselves. It’s populism innit.
Why propose a sensible policy for the the benefit of society when you can find someone to blame.

You know how the government are painting the young as reluctant to vaccinate and therefore to blame if they get ill? In spite of the quests at vaccination centres? All that nonsense about having to offer deliveroo and uber vouchers? My DC and their friends (under 25) spent hours on the computer booking vaccination slots and bringing forward second jabs as soon as they were allowed, and still some of them are waiting for second jabs. Four who were still single jabbed got Covid at a recent get together of ten. All were very ill and still have no sense of taste and smell (my DB still struggles to eat after catching Covid in January because everything tastes literally of shit). It is entirely the government’s fault The young will not easily forget the way they have been thrown under a bus to please the older Tory voters.

We lost the chance to have a zero Covid strategy in January 2020 but there is a hell of a lot the government could be doing to enlist us all in acting for the common good and reducing case numbers instead of letting this horrible virus rip just so Boris and friends don’t have to wear a mask…..

We lost the chance to have a zero Covid strategy in January 2020

We could have slowed the spread, absolutely, but we lost the chance to have a zero covid strategy in May 1994.

www.theguardian.com/travel/from-the-archive-blog/2019/may/01/channel-tunnel-opens-eurostar-may-1994

With the exception of one or two other posts you are the only one to do so, apart from the British/American posts trying to point out Delta is totally different to the Alpha strain. The thread is littered with false hope based on old vaccine promises.

About 95 percent of Kiwi posters in this thread so far have already said exactly what she just said, but sure, don't let your lack of reading comprehension skills stop you from claiming the opposite.

@bogoffmda

Would be interesting to hear the Kiwi mumsnetters views on the offensive statement

"We waited, we let you lot be guinea pigs and now we know it's safe. If anything the delay has made people more likely to get the vaccine.

An abject lack of addressing this post but happy to chat about the weather ( So British!)

As to our level of social responsibility as a nation - am not sure we rank that highly. Having lived in 6 countries - 3 of which take social responsibility to a level, I have not seen in either the UK, NZ or Oz. We have a healthcare system which has scoring systems for access to investigations and treatments, waiting lists in normal times that other countries are only now approaching post pandemic, social housing is poor and poor distribution of wealth around the country - not the worst but not perfect either.

The closing quote marks are missing so can’t tell if you are referring to the whole passage or trying to make an additional statement but:

The part about using people as guinea pigs is gross and entitled.

The bit about Brits talking about the weather is a bit of a lazy stereotype as well. Kiwi’s do it lots too (although talking about the housing market seems to have overtaken that one!). It’s a pretty common thing in most countries I’ve lived in.

Kiwi who previously lived in the UK for a number of years.

Pics Hong King has managed it with some of the busiest border crossings in the world and extensive transport and economic links with the country of origin for the pandemic. This idea we are somehow unique in our connectivity and so could not control spread is another example of the exceptionalism that made us one of the world’s pandemic hotspots in the first place. Of course Hong Kong had the benefit of experience……

The name zero Covid is a misnomer anyway. There is no single strategy for reducing case numbers, different countries have done it in different ways. Just applying a series of infection control measures, none perfect, that act like a series of leaky sieves, each contributing to reducing infections. The issue is what does a society regard as an acceptable number of cases, (imported or community transmission). New Zealand Taiwan South Korea all have one common value, that they want to reduce the number of people getting ill as far as possible. We now have no such protection, most of the leaky sieves having been remove dot leave just a couple of leaky sieves ( the PHE conceding test trace and isolate has failing to have much impact on transmission ) , a chaotic and inconsistent system of border control and vaccination, and we have not even offered the latter to the young.

I see reporting around a "stricter" level 4. In all seriousness, what would level 5 look like as level 4 is already fairly hard? Would it be European style "confined to apartments" with zero exercise, zero time outside, and only once a week to the supermarket with an attestation?

I think it's more about temporarily reducing the number of so-called 'essential services' (there's already a bit of flex in this category and some businesses that call themselves essential are not genuinely essential) and perhaps reducing the number of large supermarkets that are operating (so chains would only be able to open a certain percentage of their outlets - for example, there are about four Countdowns that could be reasonably considered 'local' to me).

People are used as guinea pigs all the time. My grandmother was used as a guinea pig (in NZ) for plastic surgery by Macindoe. An awful lot of people, British and NZ benefitted as a result.

NZ failed to contain Covid-19 because they had such a low uptake of the vaccine.

They clearly couldn't stay locked down forever, but total vaccination of the entire population had to be the only solution.

Uptake was very low, therefore their lockdown was a failure.

Sorry about the syntax, posting on the phone whilst doing something else on the computer!

Ginger Failed? Surely that remains to be seen? Taiwan is back to zero community transmission. I don’t see having fewer daily community cases in a whole country than one London suburb, in fact only twice as many as my one Council ward as failure!

PicsHong King has managed it with some of the busiest border crossings in the world

Their border crossings are with China. If China hadn't contained the virus (until now), HK wouldn't either.

The UK is a travel hub by air. We could have cut tourism, but this would have slowed covid, not stopped covid.

We bloody well should have slowed covid

"We waited, we let you lot be guinea pigs and now we know it's safe. If anything the delay has made people more likely to get the vaccine."

As a Kiwi, I think it's a thoughtlessly grim thing to say.

The reality though is that as New Zealand did not have many/any Covid cases for a long time, so it was an unsuitable environment for testing the vaccine. You could give a bunch of people jabs in the arm but with no Covid in the community, there would be no useful feedback about the vaccine's effectiveness.

The other reality is also that many people in countries where Covid has been rife have been slow to get jabbed because of feeling anxious about whether the vaccine was free from side-effects, with some initial legitimate cause. This has meant that despite widespread availability of the vaccine, uptake hasn't been quite as swift and universal as might have been ideal.

So you can't wholesale condemn a cautious approach in a country that was not dealing with an active threat from the virus within the community.

Pics Not true. Hong Kong implemented its public health strategy including closing the borders to all but business people in January, before China admitted it had a an epidemic let alone contained it. Taiwan tipped them off in December that passengers were arriving from Wuhan with a mystery respiratory virus. Taiwan started boarding Wuhan planes to do health checks in mid December and implemented their public health strategy on 31 December. All this in full view of the west who chose to ignore the threat.

Hong Kong airport is indeed an international air hub and also entrance point for the increasing proportion of mainland tourists as well as being one of the world’s three main financial hubs with New York and London (2 of those three now mortally wounded of course) with the associated international travel . There are also numerous border crossings, a rail tunnel and a huge great bridge to the mainland.

However once border controls were implemented, then the strategy of quarantining visitors, offering testing within the hour, admitting all cases of Covid to hospital quarantine wards and moving them to active treatment wards as soon as needed and reactivating the quarantine facilities used in 2003 for all contacts of people who test positive has proved effective in reducing cases and deaths. Up until recently there had been 7 deaths in a city of 7m. People, including expats (so forget that tired old racial stereotyping of Asian passivity versus western agency completely negated by the pre crackdown political protests) were happy, apart from some moans about needing Sriracha to counteract the beige food, to go along because cases were so low and so few people affected.

Of course in common with other countries that have limited case numbers vaccination take up has been low compounded by mistrust of China but now Pfizer is on offer to everyone and it is picking up.

so forget that tired old racial stereotyping of Asian passivity versus western agency completely negated by the pre crackdown political protests

What on earth did I just read?