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Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

I'm in NZ.... hard to tell, we have some significant financial aid for businesses to finance and pay wages during the lockdown. Not sure how that's going to work out. It feels like we are possibly in a bit of a sweet spot where we are small enough but big enough to weather our way through this, but hard to know anything for sure. I think we will see the tourism industry savaged a fair bit.

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also...In many ways I'm way more worried about the fallout from the US economy, their whole leadership seems a mess with great political divides, lots of mixed messages, and a large growth in cases.

similarly in NZ.

The health care system is pretty abysmal here which I think is why the government is acting so strongly now; The city I'm in has just 18 ICU beds for a population of around 500,000. We're heading into winter as well and from what I've heard the government is expecting to hit peek case-rates in August.

If that is the case, I expect the full lockdowns will be a periodic thing over the coming months in order to keep cases manageable.

Too early to really tell how this is going to play out, but I don't think the current financial measures are enough; I expect we'll continue to see them expand in the coming weeks in an attempt to keep businesses a float.

I read that in Australia there are a total of 2,200 ICU beds for the ~25 million population. As a result of COVID-19 they're increasing this number as much as possible, but if the infection rates continue the current trend, then there are going to be large numbers of people dying due to the lack of resources.

  18 in 500,000 is 0.00366%
  2,200 in 25,000,000 is 0.0088%

More than double, but still likely to be woefully inadequate.

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