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Comment by xienze | Hacker News Reader

> Testing has been focused on people with symptoms, with tracing of both close contacts and casual contacts. However, more widespread testing is now being introduced.

Might be a bit early to proclaim it’s been “eliminated” based on a single day of no new reported cases considering the asymptomatic aren’t widely being tested.

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No new community transmission cases for weeks, all new cases linked to known clusters, and we're trending towards zero active cases nationwide -- every day for over a month there has been a decrease in active cases.

https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/05/06/1101216/covid-19-in-nz...

many regions haven't had a new case in weeks

Someone with a better clinical understanding than I do can probably shed more light on this, but the NZ Director General of Health briefly touched on this, saying there is a difference between elimination and eradication in medical lingo. That may also apply to the Lancet article. I’ll try to find more later if no-one else answers this better.

That's right, and there was a brief controversy here when the Director General and the Prime Minister said that NZ had eliminated COVID and that was taken by most people to mean that it no longer existed here. They later had to backtrack somewhat and explain the difference.

Basically elimination means that the disease is totally under control, and any new cases can be dealt with via testing and tracing. Eradication means that the disease is completely wiped out and no longer exists here.

Elimination means removal of something. Eradication means it will never come back. So maybe they meant (or should have meant) that the risk of exponential spread has been eliminated.

Correct. The US has "eliminated" measles (since there are almost no cases and it's not difficult to contain), but the world has "eradicated" small pox (since the virus itself literally only exists in a couple of research labs in the entire world).

This is covered in the article, and I posted this comment above:

It's important to note that the term "eliminated" does not mean that we have no cases of Covid-19. The govt uses terms like "eliminated" and "eradicated" to mean different things with subtle differences, so they can be used to measure progress. From the article (in case you didn't read) "Elimination to everyone means that it is gone. But in epidemiological terms, it means bringing cases down to zero or near zero in a geographical location"

For the last few weeks there has been widespread testing of asymptomatic people. E.g. teams showing up at a supermarket and testing everyone, testing everyone associated with a school that had a pretty large cluster.

It is true that still most tests are on symptomatic people. But if there was undetected community transmission then you would expect some of those people to develop symptoms and eventually get tested and test positive. (Currently the PM is saying "if you have a sore throat or a sniffle, get tested" --- the bar for symptoms is extremely low.) So it's reasonable to assume that there isn't significant undetected community transmission.

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