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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

And what, pray tell is a “proper lockdown”?

I hardly think NZ and AU are places to copy.

Why not NZ?

We're in our 2nd 'level 4' lockdown in 18 months. The economy is doing fine and for most of that 18 months we were living completely normally. We have record low case numbers and deaths.

How has the NZ tourism sector been going - eg QT/Wanaka? Did domestic tourism pick up the slack?

I can't speak for NZ, but in AU domestic tourism has more than picked up the slack - domestic tourists have spent more money than international tourists

When Auckland is locked down, Queenstown is a ghost town, but otherwise (50 out of last 52 weeks?) we've been pretty busy actually.

So much so that the tourism spokespeople who railed against the first lockdown are saying "Lets lock down hard so we can open up again faster" this time.

It’ll be interesting to see how this ages in the next few weeks. I hope you get the current outbreak under control (I have many friends in NZ) but containing the delta variant seems unlikely and because of NZ’s great success so far you seem to have slept on the vaccine. If it doesn’t get brought under control it could be disastrous.

It will be fascinating, and I agree the vaccine rollout has not been the speediest. However, one thing on our side is that we have experienced the benefits of elimination, so our lockdown compliance is extraordinary.

I guess I'd be worried about the rate of breakthrough infections amongst vaccinated people in Israel, the first good data we have (the reason for booster shots). That same data showed that natural immunity was much better. [0]

It may be the case where countries like New Zealand can only delay, but not prevent, this moving through their population at some point.

[0] https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/309762

Taiwan had only a few weeks of full lockdown last year, and then a few months of softer lockdown during the second outbreak this year. During the recent outbreak it was WFH and takeout from restaurants with certain businesses closed. About 100 days later most things are open again.

They resisted a full lockdown and doubled down on contact tracing. Went from 500+ cases a day to just a few now.

Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare.

Honestly, it all sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

Good point. Phew. Slowly being normalized.

Actually in terms of Orwellian nightmares, normalizing mask wearing in public is an incredibly significant blow you can strike against the surveillance state.

So comply with the government in order to get our freedoms?

Makes sense....

I mean, on the one hand, you're not wrong.

I suppose one "solution" is one of those fake masks that looks real, but does nothing. Technically compliant with the letter of the law, but still striking a blow, with the bonus of hiding your face.

> Contact Tracing sounds like an Orwellian nightmare

George Orwell, who actually died of an infectious disease ( Tuberculosis ), being recruited posthumously to the "lets spread disease without restraint" brigade is quite low.

Don't understand how him dying of TB invalidates his ideas.

It’s been done for at least a hundred years, well before Orwell. Nice try though.

Not with this level of technology and with this big of scale.

Come to think of it when has contact tracing been done before?

All communicable diseases (measles, etc) in western countries, especially starting with smallpox eradication in the 1950s. Look it up!

Contact tracing is looking for people that came in contact with infected individuals. When a coworker gets covid they investigate where they went and who they came in contact with so that person can get tested. Not sure how that is Orwellian.

What people would consider Orwellian is the app you can use to scan in at places. That's voluntary, but almost everyone uses it and you still have to sign in on paper if you don't.

Personally, I don't mind. We all carry around GPS tracking devices every day, and it's silly to think that governments can't already track those. Even with GPS off you can be tracked if hitting wifi or different cell towers.

Can you flesh that out? Emulating New Zealand's death rate in the USA would have saved at least 600k lives so far.

NZ and AU are faring pretty differently. AU is wracked with crisis and NZ has been business as usual for ages. The key difference as I understand it is that NZ sacrificed easy international travel for domestic wellbeing and AU didn't.

AU has certainly sacrificed international travel also - there are still Australians trying to get back. Aus outbreaks were mostly from escapes from hotel quarantines, and the quarantines were in the major cities.

And NZ is having outbreaks from hotel quarantine in the middle of major cities too, exactly like us.

Australia has far more restrictions on travel.

For outbound travel Australians are required to get a government exemption to leave the country. Australia also has far fewer inbound quarantine places per capita.

Also internally most states require entry/exit permits and frequently close thier borders to one another.

NZ is well on the path to becoming like AU in the next few weeks - it's not at all obvious they'll manage to crush their current outbreak and won't end up like Victoria currently, and their vaccination and even testing capabilities seem to be behind Australia considerably.

Agree that there's no guarantee of success. However, the political environment and compliance with lockdowns is very different between the two countries. For example, New Zealand is seeing nothing like the widespread protests in Melbourne and across Victoria.

Give it a month

The impression I get as an internet observer from the West Island is that on the whole the NZ government has done a much better job of public communications, maintaining social cohesion, and not trying to police their way out of a pandemic than Australia has. But we'll see whether that lasts. The political environment can change - see NSW - and if level 4 restrictions last more than a few weeks I think you might see the protests start up.

Australia sacrificed international travel too. It still leaked in which led to occasional limited lockdowns. Until Delta strain hit and spread too fast for the small lockdown strategy to contain it.

Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

Then the AZ side effects became an issue and there was no backup plan.

But even the AZ rollout was a debacle with no one sure if they were eligible or how to get it. And the Prime Minster excusing it all by saying "it's not a race".

If Australia had the vaccination rate of the US or the UK (which was absolutely achievable) then Australia would still be the envy of the world.

> Australia screwed up the vaccination strategy. They bought AstraZeneca and relied on a domestic vaccine that was being developed which failed in trials.

New Zealand also screwed up vaccinations by not buying AstraZeneca - as evidenced by the fact that they're several percentage points behind Australia and constrained by Pfizer supplies from overseas with no ability to rely on domestic or Australian manufacturing.

Australia ordered AZ from overseas, AZ manufactured locally, Pfizer, Novavax and now Moderna (as well as the UQ vaccine which as you mentioned failed).

The issues with the non-AZ vaccines was that they didn't lock in early supply dates soon enough. For example, in June (which was already late for what was needed) Australia only had 1.7M Pfizer doses available[1] and now the PM is putting out press releases about obtaining extra supply from Poland[2].

Australia needed the doses in April/May, not September/October.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-09/australia-to-get-pfiz...

[2] https://www.health.gov.au/news/vaccine-operations-centre-wee...

I'm not saying the Australian rollout has been good. I'm just saying it's been better than New Zealand.

the states that do actual hard and fast lockdowns do well. See WA, QLD, NT, SA.

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