U.S. warns against travel to New Zealand due to rising Covid-19 cases
rnz.co.nz
rnz.co.nz
At the beginning various strategies were proposed. A few looked utterly bizarre: IIRC the UK plan was to "keep the schools open so the kid can catch it".
In retrospect, some start standing out as better - but data is still coming so it's too early to say for sure.
It has a trivial effect at the population level wrt the spread of covid.
This is false. It does not stop transmission. It does reduce it.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/31/the-new-omicron-subvariant-i...
I can try to locate the link if you're interested.
To say "Vaccination doesn't reduce transmission" is to say "Vaccination has no effect on the R value". It clearly does.
Keeping deaths down. 84% of the country now has at least one dose, and half have three. Australia took the same approach - strict measures until widespread vaccination.
Per https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat..., they're at 13 deaths per million citizens. The US is at 2,916.
A single nursing home in New Jersey lost more staff and residents to COVID in a few weeks than the entire country of New Zealand did in two years. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/nyregion/coronavirus-nj-a...
That's because Phil Murphy issued a monumentally stupid edict preventing nursing homes from barring entry by people known to be COVID-positive.
New Zealand has 65. Even normalized for population, our per capita death rate is over 200 times theirs. Many stupid decisions are involved in that, but it's hard to argue NZ didn't do a good job here.
I have.
It's hard for most people to understand how utterly isolated they are unless they've traveled there.
Countries like the US with land borders aren't able to isolate. The US has tens of thousands of people enter every day in unregulated fashion, across the southern border alone.
New Zealand successfully locked their country down, and delayed COVID infection until a vastly milder variant that was more contagious showed up. It's hard to think a non-island nation could successfully achieve the same strategy. Every single person who enters the nation is forced to go through an airport, or far more rarely, a seaport. That confers an ability to strictly regulate entry for citizens and visitors alike.
I can't wait for the conclusions in 10 years that are based on much less heated analyses. People will probably finally agree that island nations that have high levels of adherence to health edicts can forestall massive outbreaks, at least temporarily, but that is not a strategy that extends outside of those situations.
Incidentally, any evidence that "natural immunity protection" is so much better than 3 doses of Pfizer that it would have been worth the excess deaths?
My point is that none of the analysis being done now controls for anything and there are a ton of different reporting systems which are being compared and people are pointing at one country or another as "having done the right thing". We simply don't have the epistemic certaintly to declare that specific techniques worked or didn't. That sort of certainty comes only after decades of people working the data over and over to identify and correct for a lot of stuff missed in the heat of the pandemic.
Like, let's say that natural immunity acquired from exposure to baseline SARS-CoV-2 meant that 99% of your population wouldn't die when other variants came through.
Would the deaths from the baseline virus be worth the protection conveyed against the other variants?
What _is_ the effectiveness of natural immunity from baseline Covid against Delta or Omicron? There must be some research, surely.
A few studies to google:
CDC's January study, although that wasn't peer reviewed since it's published in MWMR, and those aren't peer reviewed.
Israel's large N study on natural immunity compared to not-previously infected, vaccinated population
Qatar's study with a sample size of 80,000 (If i recall the sample correctly)
Natural immunity conferred greater protection than vaccination alone for Delta. That's clear in these papers. Probably was not the case for previous variants, because the vaccines were generated from the earlier strain. I find it odd that there wasn't a concerted effort to "update" the vaccines with the newer genetic material for the more recent strains. Perhaps it wasn't sensible due to continued mutations inevitable with the virus.
For a non-island example, Thailand managed to hold out for over a year.
The US death rate looks bad when compared to other non-island developed world nations, too. All of Western Europe did better.
Obesity is a massive contributor to death, and we all know that no country in Western Europe is remotely close to the US in that category. Sweden took the opposite approach of New Zealand, for example, and has a lower death rate than the strictest US states did, and lower than most European countries. They are also infinitely healthier than the US as a population, which represents a confounding variable.
Even within the US, Utah performed better than Colorado, yet the two states are culturally dissimilar and Utah has a far more conservative government, despite them bordering each other and having similar climates.
Source for data on these statements I've written:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=usa&areas=hun&are...
I think it's far too early to truly understand what policies were working and which were not. I'm looking forward to a year from now when there will be a lot clearer information and less egos involved.
https://www.health.govt.nz/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-...
:)
Also, having a covid wave with 94% of adults fully vaccinated isn't "just as much of a covid problem" as the waves in unvaccinated populations elsewhere last year.
But we all just did what we needed to do. I think we got a great result from that in the end, and the government adjusted the Covid response to the public opinion as we eventually tired of lockdowns and had access to and good uptake of vaccines.
I would give our Covid response 8/10. Only thing that could have been better is we got the vaccine a few months early then it would have been more like 9/10 as we wouldn't have been rushing to vaccinate just as Delta was hitting and rushing to boost while Omicron is hitting.
Where I live, the pediatric psychiatry clinics are still badly overloaded due to children who coped and then, when school and social activities were harshly constrained, didn't cope. I had the impression that NZ's lockdowns, such as they were, avoided that kind of severity.
They never had a major outbreak with an unvaccinated population.
They never had a major outbreak of Delta or Alpha or any more-deadly strain.
Their first experience with Covid is an outbreak of Omicron, the mildest variant yet, with a highly vaccinated population.
Plus now there are viable treatments.
That was the point.
So yep, we're hitting widespread Omicron now, but a) it appears to have far less severe health impacts compared to strains like Delta and b) 95.2% of Kiwis have had two doses of Pfizer, 72.5% the booster.
https://www.health.govt.nz/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-...
Compared to what I've seen on the news over the last 2 years from countries overseas we've had a really easy time.
Vaccination decouples case numbers from severe disease and death. The calculus on avoiding cases changes significantly once you get the population well vaccinated.
Also, presumably the epidemiological factors which are causing Americans to die from COVID at higher rates are also likely to apply to Americans who are infected while traveling to New Zealand.
Yes, and they're entering it with a well-vaccinated population, especially in the vulnerable age groups. Even with variants in play, evidence points heavily to that meaning cases won't lead to significant numbers of severe disease and death.
You started this subthread by making a comment about "burning rooms", implying that the US situation is somehow worse than New Zealand in the present moment. Historical trends are what they are, but currently, irrespective of aggregate historical death rate, NZ is doing worse than the US. There's probably a greater risk of catching Covid right now in NZ than there is in the US.
(But this is all a silly discussion. The horse is out of the barn, Covid is literally everywhere, and these travel restrictions do nothing but cause pain. About the best you can say is that state department "recommendations" are the least absurd of an overall absurd response.)
What actually matters is the rate of hospitalizations and deaths.
And we're all going to be exposed to the virus anyway. Whether that happens at home or abroad hardly matters.