Also, outside the quarantine zone, no one in New Zealand is in the hospital with Covid.
A slowly building immunity among the lowest risk group seems like a better long term strategy, and put the old and at risk people into something like New Zealand.
Either way as a country that depends on tourism you can’t be infecting tourists
Seems like life is back to normal and the lockdown is over in NZ
That's a lot of people who need rejobbed
A strong vaccine candidate within the next 6 months is a strong likelihood, along with antibody-based therapeutics. So the plan is to hold out, keep the internal domestic economy moving forward - the tourism hit was going to happen anyway, so might as well have everything else as operational as possible.
Herd immunity is not a strategy, it's just what used to happen before we understood that we could actually reduce the impact of disease on our lives.
There's zero evidence to support this assertion. First there's zero evidence that it's "strong", whatever that means. Second there's zero evidence that we'll have it in the next 6 months. Remember, it also has to be safe, not just "strong". Ensuring that takes a lot of time.
NZ may be isolated for a long time. But given the alternatives, that’s the approach I’d take too.
Oh, wait. We are...
(These are all honest questions, I’m not leading. I don’t know where to find this information summarized.)
Even relatively less dangerous viruses, like influenza, have strong vaccination programs, and relatively more dangerous viruses (measles, mumps, smallpox, etc.) are only words I know because of the vaccines I got as a child. I can't think of a disease with a nontrivial mortality rate that we don't aggressively vaccinate and have public health measures to prevent. Can you?
Destroying civilization in the off chance that it might help is the approach that’s worrisome.
The resultant unwinding of commercial real-estate debt hasn’t even begun. The deflationary spike and follow-on “riding the dragon” of inflationary response by central banks hasn’t even begun.
When we finish consuming our personal reserves, and begin in earnest to try to supply food and lodging to the, what, 50% of the population not “employed” by government, what do you guess is going to happen.
It will be illuminating, at least, to those who think they understand how civilization works...
This was the standard of care for chickenpox (herpes zoster, aka shingles) until 10 or 20 years ago, for example. Sure, the mortality rate is lower, especially among healthy children.
You're off by a decade and possibly two. I'm older than 20, I was vaccinated for Chickenpox. The vaccine has been commercially available for 35 years.
So I'd reiterate the question.
There may have been a vaccine 35 years ago (I'll take your word for it), but it was not the standard of care even ~25 years ago.
(And to be clear, I'm not advocating for exposing people to COVID, at all. You asked a very broad question upthread with an easy counter-example — chickenpox — and I provided the counterexample.)
Planet-wide.
I can only imagine that NZ is indeed sitting this out till a vaccine is available, because if countries that had herd immunity as a goal in the first place to not have that goal anymore, it probably means it isn't feasible.
That being said, I don't see how _any_ country is able to do anything other than sit this out. Everyone in the US, NL, even DE (which is doing okay in Europe) or NZ and TH (with no local infections) cannot do anything else than to wait for a vaccine to be available or before we just accept this as a reasonable risk.
Personally I think accepting the risk is the most likely situation. I do not have much confidence in a good vaccine being available in 2021, personally I'll get back on the plane in 2021 and just accept the risk. I als know that this is something a lot of people will not accept, but we cannot lock up the world economy for a few years for a virus where the fatality rate for healthy people is so low.
Tactical lockdowns with a strategic approach of maintaining rapidly escalating procedures on a hair trigger is the approach NZ's been taking, and thus far, it's afforded them a much better quality of life compared to the rest of the world.
It's whack-a-mole, but shit, it's cheaper and more effective than whatever it is we're doing in the US.
FTFY
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/10/health/coronavirus-obesit...
Unless of course you're worried about the side effect of making a large number of people seriously ill, but if you don't see a way of doing it without causing a ridiculous number of people to fall ill then perhaps it isn't the best choice?
But if you're talking about infecting a large part of the population deliberately then it seems to me you should try to do it as quickly as possible because isolating the vulnerable part of society from the rest is not a sustainable situation.
And well, if we're talking about infecting a large part of society anyway then health and human lives are apparently already expendable to some extent.
Which is why the “Lock down hard to flatten the curve” thing never really made sense to me. If you prevent all transmission you’ll just drag out the pain. I thought cases are just going to shoot back up when you open so what’s the point?
(Turns out I was wrong though. Delaying cases was very valuable. People getting sick now are much more likely to survive.)
I very much want to read discussion on your first paragraph.
Sure, NZ's approach cannot be replicated everywhere else, but the fact is they have this under control and their people can (now) go about their lives.