Neither approach worked. The NZ approach merely delayed the inevitable and was horrific for citizens who wanted to return home and were unable to do so. One NZ citizen had to rely on the kindness of the Taliban because nowhere else would take her. Incidents like that are nothing to be proud of.
Meanwhile, good luck implementing such controls in places where it's easier to get to!
History will record that the country that ignored the hysteria came out with some of the best results in Europe, revealing the truth that expert advice was damaging and futile. Something that was already clear in 2020 to anyone who cared to look.
Anyway, death rates are garbage data during COVID. They were classifying murders by shooting as COVID deaths. They were classifying people who died at 95 as COVID deaths. Where lockdowns were implemented they wanted the measured death rates to be as high as possible to justify what was being done, so classification criteria were as loose as possible. In NZ the political narrative relied on border closures being effective so they needed deaths to be as low as possible. Public health is so corrupt and malign that you can never really know what's going on if you listen to them.
> All the political parties in NZ were unanimous in stating that the elimination strategy was the right choice
Then they are idiots because COVID wasn't eliminated, was it? As you said yourself, their strategy was at best one of delaying the inevitable.
It works when (or rather almost entirely because) you’re in a geographically isolated island.
Maybe the Netherlands could have pulled this of if they really wanted to, like them time they flooded half of the country to keep out the French but it’s not applicable to any other country in Europe
One perspective to consider is resource limitation as how it affected individuals and their families.
There are folks who would have died in the peaks due to resource limitations and public policy smoothed this out. Even post vaccine, I know someone close to me who ended up in ICU with COVID.
They would have died if it was earlier because there was not enough resources. Even if there wasn't formal triaging that just meant it was dumped on care providers without the support of policy.
To you and the others here: look, I'm sorry you missed a funeral or your parents missed the birth of a grandchild or whatever, but please appreciate that for every one of you out there there is someone out that is thankful their spouse or mother didn't die. The lack of empathy has made me lose faith in a big part of society.
I presume you benefit from living in a society. There are trade offs and costs to this benefit. Even if you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, have a business, self made man whatever you benefit regardless of your feelings on others and their entitlements from the infrastructure. It gives you access to whatever it is that you make you living doing.
You are welcome to go live on the trap line and ignore all this and thus abstain but please, please be consistent and don't show up to clog a hospital bed when you get sick from the consequences of you actions.
As an aside certainly some have died from aggressive dog breeds. I personally agree with the bans that exist in some municipalities on them to prevent a toddler from getting mauled. But I can see how some don't and that is a valid perspective.
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
GP certainly exaggerated by labelling the situation as minor inconvenience. It was a major upheaval to all our lives. There is no arguing though that curfews can and did help - at least where conducted properly and with support of the populace (there's little hope if people are not even trying to cooperate though); the first "lockdown" (it was called like that but actually there were only curfews here) in Germany comes to mind - things went only downhill here after the first partially re-opened summer when different states and politicians discovered the situation as a way to compete with each other.
This is hindsight though. In the beginning there was no reliable information on transmission vectors or infectiousness and the lack of tests, drugs, vaccines and treatments (even simple things like positioning patients prone to make breathing easier) or simply protection equipment left imo little choice than to treat the situation as severe as possible (better save than sorry).
All in all I think that most of it was unavoidable, although I absolutely agree that this was in every way a situation that was hard to deal with for all of us.
It was clear lockdowns would end this way almost immediately. The diamond princess cruise ship proved that SARS-CoV-2 spread through aerosols, like a gas. It can spread through air ducts between locked rooms. The moment you accept that, the failure of lockdowns becomes entirely foreseeable. Nor was this unexpected. SARS-1 could spread the same way, as proven by outbreak investigations at the time.
And yes, there were people pointing this out in early 2020. The idea that nothing was known so the most extreme response possible was justified is:
1. Wrong
2. Illogical anyway! There are always unknowns, if you always overreact any time you're in s new situation we diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. It's not normal or healthy.
I absolutely argue that they did not “help”. COVID is still here. Everybody will still get it at some point in their lives and it’s no less deadly than it was when the curfews started. They delayed some cases of COVID but did t prevent anything. At enormous cost, any way you measure it.
In a situation where we did not have any lockdowns or curfews or measures in place, there would've been far more deaths because of limited hospital capacity being entirely consumed.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/0...