100 days without Covid-19: how New Zealand got rid of a virus | Hacker News Reader

100 days without Covid-19: how New Zealand got rid of a virus

theconversation.com

13 pointscoltnz5 comments

Good to see someone acknowledge the Australian states individually for their efforts.

Queensland (where I am) by the numbers is roughly the same population as NZ and has managed to keep cases and fatalities to a fraction. With the border closing again this weekend the state government is again not bowing to pressure from the other states or the Australian government to keep the border open so we can stay open locally.

With the decent levels of tracing and reporting, absence of misaligned incentives and lack of politicising, I think there's probably some good data in the NZ experience, in terms of actual mortality rate, cohort risk and level of complications.

We seem to have people travelling overseas and testing positive at their destination. I'm not convinced we have gotten rid of it just yet.

There's non-trivial community testing that hasn't found people with Covid-19 in NZ. So either (a) every case in NZ is asymptomatic, (b) there are only a few cases that somehow defy the exponential growth we saw at the start of lockdown, or (c) there are no cases in NZ. I find the lowest probability explanation to be that there are no cases in NZ.

So what about the three cases of travellers testing positive overseas? The one in South Korea went via Singapore and it's hypothesized that the traveller caught Covid-19 there. There has been testing of the places in NZ where the traveller went before they left (e.g., Queenstown and Milford), so far with no positives found. One tested positive in Australia but was never "in" New Zealand -- her flight was LA-Auckland-Sydney. And in the final case, the woman had been ill in March after returning from overseas and it's thought she hasn't been infectious. They've all been contact-traced and testing came back negative.

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