Could the UK have been like NZ

[pipnchops]

I've just been looking at a friend's pictures from New Zealand and life is pretty much back to normal there. It got me thinking, would that have been possible here in the UK? I know I'm crying over spilt milk here but I'm just sat here wondering if anyone more in the know can explain why our government handled it all so differently. I know our population is huge by comparison but I feel like the big difference is our government thought herd immunity was the answer (despite there being no evidence that getting the virus gave you immunity) whereas NZs PM said that this strategy was not an option from the start.

We could have done things better, but as a densely populated island that is a major transit and travel hub we couldn't have done what New Zealand did

No. We have too many people to do it like NZ.

No. We have too many people, far less space and far more travel (both inside the UK and through it)

No. Because of the way our supply chains work. And because the U.K. includes NI - which has a land border with RoI.

No, there were too many infections here seeded from Italy and Spain in February, New Zealand locked down about the same time as us with a much lower level of infections. I don’t think the general population would have complied with a lockdown here at the time it would have needed to happen to achieve the same results.

For a clue I recommend a trip to somewhere like Dover and watch the lorries pouring off the ferries, hundreds every hour. Each lorry has a driver. I can't imagine a replacement system for that being set up in a hurry, specially with everything closed for Covid and without it we'd run out of a lot more than toilet rolls very quickly.

NZ's imports come in on containers on huge ships, or by air. No incoming human involved.

Yes of course we could have... all we would have needed to do was deport every person outside of the M25, and then disperse the 9 million people inside the M25 to all of the other areas of the UK. Then we would need to physically break Wales and Scotland off of England, and divide them by water, to make movement slightly harder. If the Politician's just focused on that, we would have been fine....

NZ has 4 million people in the entire country. We have over double that in London alone.

The country is set up completely differently with regards to travel, imports, population density etc. It’s just not comparable.

Don’t get me wrong, we could have done things a hell of a lot better, but we can’t just point to NZ and say “but they managed it!”

NZ is also in a recession of its own, and they’re in a delicate position as they effectively have to remain isolated as an entire country in order to prevent retransmission until some nebulous future date when it’s safe to open the borders properly again. It’s not all sweetness and light over there.

Thank you for your replies, I apologise if it was a ridiculous question but I needed to ask as, while I'm happy for my friend being able to do things as normal, I felt sad thinking that could have been us had things been handled differently.

I think it's fair enough to ask OP - I'm sure lots of people have wondered about the issue.

I think with Heathrow and Gatwick plus everything we import through the tunnel would have made it utterly impossible. I think of Boris telling the country that was the path we were going to take in January or February and businesses would have been up in arms. There would have been outrage because of the perceived financial hit. At that point no one thought it was going to hit us in the way it did and there was talk about it being much more of a slow burn if it did arrive here. I went on holiday at the very end of February and the virus still felt far away and it seemed like we had at least a few months before it caused us serious problems except we were in lockdown a couple of weeks later.

We are so different to NZ in so many ways. I still see experts like Devi Sridhar asking that we close our borders to get our cases eradicated and while I think she's an incredibly intelligent human, it seems to me it would do so little. There virus is here, it is everywhere - we'd need an incredibly strict 3-4 month lockdown to get cases low enough for that to have an impact at this stage and people don't have the stomach for it. They literally wouldn't comply. Plus it would be economic carnage if we did that.

Other than the points made above the other big difference is NZ has a competent government.

But also we don't know how the whole story plays out yet.

In summer we had so few cases that vaccines were having to be trialled abroad as they couldn't guarantee enough exposure to covid.

And we had few cases in the summer because people weren't allowed to travel overseas during lockdown unless they had good reason and people coming in were coming in from locked down countries (despite hysteria on here and elsewhere over flights - about 5% of them were actually operating).

I think we could have perhaps bubbled with Ireland and closed the borders for leisure travel, but having thousands of lorries going in and out every day would definitely have made it harder to achieve what New Zealand did. It was a gamble too that a vaccine would be found quickly. It looks like that gamble may have paid off, but it might not have done, and there is still some way to go before we will know for certain.

@Pahrump - We could have done things better, but as a densely populated island that is a major transit and travel hub we couldn't have done what New Zealand did

The UK isn't an island.....