Going NZ style

[Rhianna1980]

To start with, I was not 100% convinced by New Zealand’s CV19 strategy, but now I’m 100% behind it and I wish the UK would follow the same strategy.

At the moment, almost every business out there is suffering, threats of going into and out of lockdown is looming ... threats closing down pubs again to help schools reopen is probable... they have admitted that we have reached the limit to what we can reopen now if we want the kids back in school in September.
Arts, theatre, cinemas, gyms, museums, hair and beauty etc are all taking a hit - current strategy is not working, so why not going full elimination style like NZ?

Their travel/tourism industry has taken the hit to save the rest of the country. But on the flip side, they know tourism had taken a dive anyway In the current situation (like most places in the world) so they might as well put stop it to let the country get on with their lives.

Essentially the whole country is now one big bubble where everyone is enjoying a normal life again. Hard to imagine!

I saw a recent picture of a rugby match in NZ with 45,000 spectators. I couldn’t help but feel jealous though I’m not into rugby.

We can’t have it all. We can’t reopen everything and hope for the best. We tried, and it’s not working perfectly and not a long term fix. Winter and flu season is coming. We can’t keep shutting businesses and Towns in and out of lockdown. Schools needs to be reopened properly, get people back to work and all the vulnerable have the right to feel confident and safe to go out again.

This is short summary of what NZ has done.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-53274085

Close airports - serious lockdown for 6 weeks to eliminate cases- Reopen the country for everyone to get back to normality again- Tourism still shut but anyone wanting to come back to the UK has to be closely monitored in quarantine for two weeks.

What do you think?

No it is too late as literally New Zealand is the only country that is now managing it and particularly after the issues in Australia and Hong Kong who tried similar I realise that New Zealand really are an outlier that is not practical for lost (8 would feel differently if it wasn’t for Australia in particular if they can’t manage it we can’t!)

That was my thinking way back in March but I’m not convinced it’ll work here. A lot of our food and medicines comes in from Europe brought into the country by lorry drivers. Northern Ireland still needs to be connected to rest of UK do they have to quarantine for 14days as well? If we did a “hard” lock down for 6 weeks will we have all the peoples support and reduce Covid to single digits? Or will some people just do their own thing (refer back to Cummings style here)?

NZ is heavily reliant on inwards people (e.g. students, tourists, immigration) for its collective living. All 3 of those require free movements of people.

Behind the scenes, both the public and private sectors are about to slash jobs. NZ put all its eggs in the early vaccine basket. If the vaccine is delayed, there will be economic repercussions.

Apart from being an island and speaking English as the main language, we really don’t have enough in common with New Zealand that would make doing a New Zealand look remotely plausible. A much larger slice of the UK economy is reliant on travel and tourism than that of New Zealand. We are also only 20 miles from France - people can smuggle themselves over in boats if they want. New Zealand is almost literally in the middle of nowhere - over a thousand miles from anywhere else, so isolated without even trying. New Zealand has a very low population density (around 15 people per square kilometre) - England has 432 per square kilometre. Yes, New Zealand has densely populated areas, but nothing like in comparison to the UK.

I think at this stage going for complete elimination of cases is not possible, but I do think the government needs to take the approach that stable case numbers are not OK. Anything other than falling case numbers should lead to a tightening, not a relaxing, of the rules. And case numbers can't just be looked at at country level (or falling case numbers in London and the South East with its large population can mask that there is a problem brewing elsewhere).

Out of interest does NZ have a vaccine candidate? Or will it be looking to import? I'd be worried that any vaccine that is not "home grown" might take a while to filter through as the country of development will presumably expect first dibs?

New Zealand’s whole population is half of the Population of London, their country is 10% bigger than the uk. We have 60 million more people than them, in a smaller area. We really can’t do the same as them.

It’s just not possible. There is no comparison between the countries.

NZ is much more remote and self sufficient than the U.K. The U.K. imports about 50% of its food, it’s a stones throw from France, shares an open border with another country, is a hub for international commerce.

Practically, it’s a non starter.

@Sunshinegirl82

Out of interest does NZ have a vaccine candidate? Or will it be looking to import? I'd be worried that any vaccine that is not "home grown" might take a while to filter through as the country of development will presumably expect first dibs?

Sadly this is likely - there was some vaccine research but nothing advanced. There will also being ongoing difficulties with general treatments as many generics sourced by Pharmac (the govt central medicines sourcer) are sourced from India, which did place restrictions (and a total ban at one point) on medicine exports during the pandemic. NZ doesn't have the level of local medicines production and sourcing ability which other countries have.

A vaccine is the answer and as soon as possible.

Oh, and of course, New Zealand does not have an international hub airport like Heathrow. Tens of millions more people travel through Heathrow each year than travel to New Zealand.

It’s too late. There’s no way the general public would cooperate with a full lockdown here now.

@PicsInRed

Interesting. I completely understand why, with its particular set of characteristics, NZ went down the route it went down, makes complete sense. That said it does now seem to be basically reliant on someone else coming up with a long term solution.

My personal view is that BJ thinks if he can make the U.K. one of the first countries to be fully vaccinated it will be our NZ moment and any previous failings will be forgiven and forgotten. I just hope that means they are throwing everything they've got at it and that they might finally get something right.

Whilst I totally think New Zealand has the right idea. We are also talking about a country whose population of sheep is higher than humans. Lowly populated and vast wide open space. I think this contributed to their success.

She made the right moral choice and got the right results. I do think we might have left it too late to achieve that.

The NZ approach feels morally repugnant to me. The daily evening news bulletins in NZ reported how many control-infractions there had been. They were the ultimate snitch-on-your-neighbours society. Promoted heavily by the PM although eventually she asked the public to stop reporting each other merely as part of ongoing feuds.

In Hong Kong they publish where the cases are right down to which apartment building, including attributes like sex and age an date of +test. Woohoo... would you like your test result data available for all to see?

Taiwan control was helped because any health care professional can easily access any of a resident's medical records. Similar accessible system was proposed previously for UK - there was huge public outcry and widely accused of poor planning.

Singapore & Japan are supposed to have great control but have struggled to get schools or Unis open. It's not like any country is finding a simple easy solution.

The collapsing international tourism industry isn't devestating New Zealand's aviation industry is it? Thousands of well paid, specialist, technical jobs being lost. It's not all easy come, easy go seŕvice jobs at the face of tourism.

We are very, very different countries in very different circumstances.

Being a island that is an international travel hub and compact enough that you can travel the majority of the distance in the country in a day means that it isn't practical to eliminate the virus without destroying our economy.

Destroy the economy and there is no NHS and quality of life and premature deaths happen anyway. There is already too much of that occurring.

Eliminating the virus sounds great in theory, but it's a very high cost strategy and high risk if an effective vaccine doesn't happen quckly.

We already have a flu vaccine. Tens of thousands die of flu despite a vaccine. Get the strain of the vaccine wrong and you can end up with 50,000 deaths as we did in 2018, yet society barely batted an eyelid then.