Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

renewiltord

Interesting. Lets run a quick comparison between Louisiana and New Zealand.

Temperature today: Auckland peaks at 19 C, New Orleans at 25 C

Population: NZ 4.8 million, Lousiana 4.7 million

Density: NZ 18 / sq. km, Lousiana 34 / sq. km

COVID cases (deaths): NZ 1445 (13) , Lousiana 24523 (1328)

View on HN

Pretty disingenuous comparison. You leave out:

Exposure to cross-border travel:

Louisiana: Home to one of the largest commercial shipping ports in the world, serving as an import/export hub for the largest national economy in the world. Has extensive land borders with said nation and large amounts of interstate travel daily.

New Zealand: Has a small export market largely focused on agriculture and a small tourism market. Is an island nation over 1300 miles away from the nearest other significant economy. All movement in/out of the nation has to go through tightly controlled ports or airports.

I don't know if I would call New Zealand's tourism market small. Small compared to New York or London maybe but relative to the size of the country, it's GDP and population? 3.8 million people visited New Zealand in 2019[1]. The population of New Zealand is only 4.8 million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_New_Zealand

I don't understand why HN users always jump into these things like it's a cage fight. The right way for you to respond is to help us collectively arrive at truth (which your qualitative statement aids mildly in) and leave out all the parts that claim bad faith from your fellow users. Jesus Christ, I even included density which points the opposite way. Now because I don't have a preconceived notion of which direction I want the results to show why NZ is performing better, I can conclude that the result is either:

* The factors described are washed out by the other factors

* These factors don't have a significant impact

* It isn't any of these that determines difference in outcome between NZ and others but action taken

No wonder you guys hate social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram if you run around calling everyone insincere at the first sign of the mildest degree of disagreement.

Louisiana also had Mardi Gras, which brought in tons of people from around the country to New Orleans, likely spreading Covid

Which should have obviously been canceled, clearly highlighting incredibly poor response.

It was on February 25th. Most of North America didn't do anything until mid-March, no?

That's part of the bad response.

Cool, can you compare hemispheres next?

So Louisiana is more densely populated, and much less isolated. Not sure what point you're making.

I agree on the isolation. I lived in NZ. As someone from North America, it was strange how isolated it felt. Especially outside of Auckland. As for density, I disagree. Most of the country is empty but the cities are surprisingly dense by North American standards considering the population size.

I've never been to NZ but the data is utterly against that. The most dense city in NZ (Auckland) has 2418 people/km^2, and Christchurch is about half that. Wellington is 1918. [0]

By contrast every US city in this table [1] is way above that, with the lowest being 3889.4. (New Orleans, surprisingly, is a mere 783 [2].)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_New_Zealand#...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans

That's interesting. I wonder how they calculated the area. There's no way Yonkers is twice as dense as Auckland in a practical sense (I would guess it's similar). As for Wellington, there's a very limited amount of space to build on because of the topography. As a result, houses are small, streets are narrow, cars are small (I had a difficult time driving a tiny hatchback). The CBD is unusually big and dense for a city with a metro population smaller than Madison, Wisconsin. The airport is shoehorned in to the only flat space in the region. So why does it have a low density? I'm assuming undeveloped regions are being counted here. I suspect density in terms of "used space" is quite high. Totally anecdotal obviously.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com